The Female Fantastic

The sudden storm of women writers’ fantastic literature in the 1890s re-
sponded to a wellspring of social and scientific progressivism. The genre
became a hotbed for the most radical and problematic debates of the
time. “New Women” authors seized the opportunity to use narratively
polymorphous supernatural subgenres to dramatize their particularly
activist arguments and ideas. Though this strain of literary feminist
energy shifts focus during the Edwardian period, we argue that, due
to literary and cultural confluences, it resurges again in the 1920s, as
post-suffrage women wrote fantastic texts reinvigorated by modernist
forms and modern life.
For women-identified writers of both eras, the fantastic offered double
vision. Not only did the genre offer strategic cover for challenging the
status quo, but it also offered a heuristic mechanism for teasing out the
gendered psyche’s links to creative, personal, and erotic agency. These
dynamic presentations of female and gender-queer subjectivity are
linked in intriguing and complex matrices to key moments in gender(ed)
history.
This volume contains essays from international scholars covering a
wide range of topics, including werewolves, mummies, fairies, demons,
time travel, ghosts, haunted spaces and objects, race, gender, queer-
ness, monstrosity, madness, incest, empire, medicine, and science. By
­i nterrogating two nonconsecutive decades, we seek to uncover the
­interrelationships among fantastic literature, feminism, and modern
identity and culture. Indeed, while this book considers the relationship
between the 1890s and 1920s, it is more an examination of women’s
modernism in light of gendered literary production during the fin de
siècle than the reverse.

Lizzie Harris McCormick holds a PhD in English Literature from The

­Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is an ­Associate ­Professor
of English at Suffolk County Community College/State U ­ niversity of
New York. She explores women’s fantastic literary ­narratives of artistic cre-
ation during the late nineteenth century, especially where they challenged
turn-of-the-century British psychological theories of creative imagination
and gender. Her scholarship appears in L
­ atchkey, Henry James e-­Journal,
Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, and The ­Fantastic of the Fin de Siècle.

Jennifer Mitchell earned her PhD in English Literature from The ­Graduate
Center, City University of New York. Currently an Assistant Professor
of English at Union College in Schenectady, New York, she is working
on a manuscript about the critical intersection between sexology, mod-
ernism, and masochism. Her scholarship has appeared in The Journal
of ­Bisexuality, Bookbird, The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, The
Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and various edited collections, and she has an
article forthcoming in The D.H. Lawrence Review.

Rebecca Soares earned her PhD in Literary Studies from the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently an Honors Faculty Fellow at
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University. She is working
on a manuscript that examines the nineteenth-century popular practice
of spiritualism, transatlantic literature and communication, and print
culture. Her work has appeared in Victorian Poetry and Victorian Peri-
odical Review and is forthcoming in Women’s Writing.
Among the Victorians and Modernists
Edited by Dennis Denisoff

This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature,

art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, so-
cial, technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the
Victorians and modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited
to, artistic and cultural debates and movements; influential figures and
communities; and agitations and developments regarding subjects such
as animals, commodification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire,
ecology, gender, nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art,
sex, ­socialism, spiritualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies
that address continuities between the Victorians and modernists are wel-
come. Work on recent responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian
novels, graphic novels, and film will also be considered.

8 Victorian Writers and the Environment

Ecocritical Perspectives
Edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison

9 Testing New Opinions and Courting New Impressions

New Perspectives on Walter Pater
Edited by Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, Martine
Lambert-Charbonnier and Charlotte Riberyrol

10 Edwardian Culture
Beyond the Garden Party
Samuel Shaw, Sarah Shaw and Naomi Carle

11 The Female Fantastic

Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s
Edited by Lizzie Harris McCormick, Jennifer Mitchell,
and Rebecca Soares

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/Among-the-Victorians-and-Modernists/book-series/ASHSER4035
The Female Fantastic
Gendering the Supernatural in the
1890s and 1920s

Edited by
Lizzie Harris McCormick,
Jennifer Mitchell, and Rebecca Soares
First published 2019
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Contents

Acknowledgments xi
Foreword xiii
N icholas Daly

Toward a Female Fantastic xvii

R ebecca S oares , L i z z ie H arris McCormick,
and J ennifer M itchell

List of Contributors xxxix

Section I
Heaps, Rubbish, Treasure, Litter, Tatters: Fantastic
Objects in Context 1
J ill G alvan

1 Framing the Fin-de-Siècle Female Narrative: Ghostly

Portraits of the Emerging New Woman 5
A nne D e L ong

2 Monstrous Femininity and Objectified Masculinity in

Daphne du Maurier’s “The Doll” 22
D onna M itchell

3 Uncanny Mediums: Haunted Radio, Feminine Intuition,

and Agatha Christie’s “Wireless” 34
J ulia Pan ko

4 Buyer Beware: Haunted Objects in the Supernatural

Tales of Margery Lawrence 50
M elissa E dmundson
viii Contents
Section II
Profoundly and Irresolvably Political: Fantastic Spaces 65
L u k e T hurston

5 Female Desire, Colonial Ireland, and the “limits of the

possible” in E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross’s
The Silver Fox 69
A nne J amison

6 The Haunting House in Elizabeth Bowen’s

“The Shadowy Third” 84
C é line M agot

7 Obscene, Grotesque, and Carnivalesque: Hope Mirrlees’s

Lud-in-the-Mist as Menippean Satire 97
J ean M ills

Section III
The Fantastic and the Modern Female Experience:
Fantastic People 113
S cott Rogers

8 Marie Corelli’s Ziska and Fantastic Feminism 119

M ary C lai J ones

9 The Fantastic and the Woman Question in Edith Nesbit’s

Male Gothic Stories 135
A ndrew H oc k S oon N g

10 Fantastic Transformations: Queer Desires and “Uncanny

Time” in Work by Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf 152
J ennifer M itchell

11 “To find my real friends I have to travel a long way”:

Queer Time Travel in Katharine Burdekin’s
Speculative Fiction 167
E li z abeth E nglish
 Contents ix
Section IV
Invitation to Dissidence: Fantastic Creatures 183
J essica D e C oux

12 Rewriting the Romantic Satan: The Sorrows and

Cynicism of Marie Corelli 186
C olleen M orrissey

13 Beauty is the Beast: Shapeshifting, Suffrage, and

Sexuality in Clemence Housman’s The Were-wolf and
Aino Kallas’s The Wolf’s Bride 203
L i z z ie H arris M c C ormic k

14 The Doctor Treats the Ten-Breasted Monster: Medicine,

the Fantastic Body, and Ideological Abuse in Djuna
Barnes’s Ryder 227
Kate S chnur

Index 243
Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful for the support of their colleagues at Arizona
State University, Suffolk County Community College, and Union College
and the engaged and engaging work of the contributors to this volume.
This collection would not have been possible without the encouraging
and challenging feedback from Dennis Denisoff during the early stages
of its inception. We also thank the anonymous readers whose insight-
ful suggestions pushed us to refine our conceptualization of the project
even further. For sharp-eyed assistance on copyediting and preparing
the book proposal for submission, we thank Paul McCormick. Eliza-
beth Hermitt’s assistance indexing the volume was also invaluable. And
finally, our gratitude to our families and friends, whose patience and
enthusiasm have sustained us through this process.
Foreword

In “A Note on Poetry” (1942), Arthur Machen, the influential writer of

the fantastic, pokes fun at academic approaches to literature by suggest-
ing a satirical exam question: “Faery lands forlorn. Draw a map of the
district in question, putting in principal towns and naming exports.” It is
enough to chill the enthusiasm of any literary critic, let alone one hoping
to illuminate the fantastic. I would like to think, though, that Machen
might have thought more kindly of the approach in this collection of es-
says, which adapts itself to its subject matter and celebrates the fugitive
qualities of the fantastic, rather than trying to pin it down. The narra-
tives explored here range from magazine ghost and crime stories to fox-
hunting novels and modernist texts, and the chapters move confidently
across British, Irish, and American literary territory, while also pivoting
between the late Victorian and the modernist. There is no single formula
for the fantastic, of course, because it is an oppositional form. Authors
of the 1890s are writing against a backdrop of empire yarns, naturalism,
and New Woman novels, inter alia, while by the 1920s fantasy appears
within a literary landscape balkanized by modernists, middlebrows, and
the producers of genre fiction. However, in both periods, women strug-
gled to be accepted as the social, political, and sexual equals of men, so
it is scarcely surprising that they were drawn to the fantastic as a mode
of writing that seemed to offer an opportunity to imagine a world whose
contours were less definite and whose ways of life were less reified. As
we see here, this created forms of continuity and resonance among the
stories they produced.
After decades in which feminist scholarship has rewritten our literary
history, this collection’s focus on the female fantastic might seem to be
no longer necessary. But as the editors indicate, recent studies of this
field, with some honorable exceptions, have in fact paid limited atten-
tion to female writers. This neglect is all the more problematic in that
women were major producers of fantastic fiction. Thus, the essays in
this collection perform valuable recovery work that would amply justify
the existence of the book. To take just two instances, Donna Mitchell
ably demonstrates that Daphne du Maurier’s little-known story of the
technological fantastic, “The Doll” (1927), deserves a wider readership;
xiv Foreword
and Julia Panko does the same for Agatha Christie’s “Wireless” (1926),
a story of the explained supernatural that nonetheless remains uncanny.
But in widening and deepening our sense of the female fantastic, these
essays also offer a challenge to existing literary histories of the period.
Our understanding of modernism alters perforce when we take into ac-
count that the experimental poet Hope Mirrlees was also the author of
the fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), assessed here by Jean Mills as
constructing “a queer social imaginary, a ‘what-if’ world and subversive
space of inclusion, embrace, and acceptance of self.” Radclyffe Hall’s fan-
tasy narrative “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” (1926) and Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando (1928) also expand our understanding of queer modernism, as
Jennifer Mitchell shows. Our ideas about genre fiction are challenged
here too; for instance, by the revelation that Agatha Christie’s tales of
reason and ratiocination also contain elements of the fantastic, and that
Marie Corelli’s late Victorian potboiler, The Sorrows of Satan (1895),
is a meditation on authorship and the literary market in which Satan
rather than the saccharine Mavis Clare is the figure for Corelli herself.
As will already be clear, this collection makes an important contri-
bution to the study of the fantastic as a subversive mode. I cannot do
full justice to all of the essays here in this brief foreword, but to give
you some idea, in her account of Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, and
Edith Nesbit, Anne DeLong argues that their stories of the supernatural
stealthily work to discredit their patriarchal narrators. Anne Jamison’s
chapter on Somerville and Ross shows how the fantastic enables what
she terms “a covert exploration of female friendship and desire.” M ­ arie
Corelli’s Ziska (1897), Mary Clai Jones argues, is a proto-feminist re-
sponse to the popular mummy’s revenge stories of H. Rider Haggard
and others. Margery Lawrence’s uncanny tales of everyday objects work
to question the domestic ideologies of the day, as Melissa Edmundson
shows.
However, no historicizing account of literary history can take for
granted that the fantastic is always and everywhere subversive, any more
than realism is always wholly reactionary. In a significant counterpoint
to the main line of this collection, two contributors argue that the fan-
tastic can do other kinds of political work too. In his account of Edith
Nesbit’s fiction, Andrew Hock Soon Ng suggests that some of her Gothic
tales rehearse a gender politics that is not in fact so very different from
the conservative positions she evinces elsewhere. And in the essay that
closes this collection, Kate Schnur persuasively argues for a reading of
Djuna Barnes’s experimental novel Ryder (1928), in which the fantastic
is far from liberatory. The fantastic stories told by the novel’s epony-
mous patriarch work to convince his children that their abusive world is
wholly natural. It is in fact the questioning response to his storytelling
by one child, Julie, which is subversive in the novel. Perhaps this is a use-
ful reminder that the fantastic can at times work to underpin the status
 Foreword xv
quo, and that we always need to be active and skeptical readers, to ask
who is telling us fantastic stories, and why.
To conclude, this collection does not purport to provide a map of the
female fantastic, but if you are travelling in that territory, you will none-
theless find it very useful, as I have.

Nicholas Daly
Toward a Female Fantastic
Rebecca Soares, Lizzie Harris McCormick,
and Jennifer Mitchell

Like the ghost which is neither dead nor alive, the fantastic is a spectral
presence, suspended between being and nothingness. It takes reality and
it breaks it.
—Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion

This collection embraces the recursive literary paradox: everything that

falls must rise. Just as Mary Shelley’s Romantic Dr. Frankenstein is re-
born as the dark fin-de-siècle Dr. Moreau decades later, this book ar-
gues that women’s fantastic writing of the 1890s finds eerily resonant
cognates in women’s fantastic modernism of the 1920s. Women writers
engaging with supernatural literature in the 1890s, though in a decadent
phase of literature, were also riding an ascendant phase of social and
scientific progressivism. They addressed, via the coded potential of the
fantastic genre, the central feminist concerns of their time. This energy
diffuses early in the following decades into other distinct forms, such as
the realist marriage problem novel, utopian fiction, the children’s imag-
inative novel, and nonfiction activist writing. However, we argue that
in the 1920s, feminist fantastic fiction is reimagined and reinvigorated
by modernist forms, psychoanalysis, physics, lesbian literary communi-
ties, and, of course, the suffrage movement’s major successes. By broadly
­considering the fantastic across two decades not often put in conversa-
tion, this collection examines the surge in and expansion of the super-
natural in texts authored by women.
Although the fantastic has had a place in Anglophone literature and
culture since long before the final decades of the nineteenth century,
with female-authored ghost stories and sensation fiction taking the lit-
erary market by storm in the 1850s and 1860s, fantastic literature in
general, and female-authored fantastic texts specifically, takes on a new
radical potential during the 1890s. This initial wave seems indebted to
the evolving cultural considerations of imperial conquests, spinsterhood,
and marriage. In the aftermath of World War I, the 1920s saw a similar
resurgence of interest in the fantastic, as modernism’s focus on narrative
and experiential fragmentation evolved to embrace the otherworldly. The
xviii Toward a Female Fantastic
political and cultural climates of these two decades fostered an interest
in supernatural thrillers, ghost stories, science fictions, and amorphous
fantasias. The uncanny effects of such literature enable countercultural
angsts to find substitutive satisfactions and conflated expression; indi-
rection, obscuration, and innuendo are ideal mediums for saying-not-­
saying things. Indeed, whatever energies crescendo in fantastic literature
are exactly those that realism, by default, tends to eclipse, reduce, or
normalize. These narratives frequently hold strong—and often covertly
revolutionary— metaphorical relations to social concerns. Supernatural
and symbolic texts are ideal sites for the encryption of radical queries
and pervasive anxieties related to gender, sexuality, religion, medicine,
science, ethnicity, and colonialism. Female-identified writers are often
occupied with such anxieties, and so the fantastic becomes a genre ideal
for experimentation and critique.
Of course, there is no female fantastic. That is to say, both terms—the
gender and the genre—are slippery for different reasons. But the fantas-
tic mode, created by female-of-center or female-identified authors and
explored from intersectional feminist lenses across decades, begins to
reveal the multivalent potential of the genre to more than express ex-
periences of gender or other subjugations or to subvert conventions. We
argue that the fantastic manifests new multivalent ways of seeing and
being and makes them cognitively possible for creators and readers. The
fantastic—already famously a “fuzzy” genre—respects no temporal,
physical, psychic, or ontological boundary (Mendlesohn xiii).1 Objects,
people, places, time, and beings are constantly shifting, in ways subtle
or overt. Readers, too, are destabilized, as they are necessarily integrated
“into the world of the characters; that world is defined by the reader’s
own ambiguous perception of the events narrated” (Todorov 31). In a
plane where the lines between the marvelous and real are so blurred, and
where so much of life is impossible to pin down in state, space, or time,
the reader’s own mind is colonized by the activity of the text. They are
fantastic-ed. 2
In her seminal work on the genre, Rosemary Jackson explains that
“the fantastic comes into its own in the nineteenth century, at precisely
that juncture when a supernatural ‘economy’ of ideas was slowly giv-
ing way to a natural one, but had not yet been completely displaced
by it” (24). Among the areas flowing back and forth between natural
­science and metaphysics was the burgeoning field of psychology. As ideas
of psychic unity break down in the nineteenth century, they are sup-
planted by new models from dipsychism and polypsychism, forerunners
of all manner of psychological discovery, to the more popular and ques-
tionable hypotheses of extrasensory perception and spiritualism. 3
This occurs as well in the purview of the fantastic, wherein mono-
psychic minds and identities are rendered multiple, replaced with “in-
coherent, fluid selves” who can “break the boundaries separating self
 Toward a Female Fantastic xix
from other, leaving structures dissolved, or ruptured, through a radi-
cal open-endedness of being” (Jackson 87). Working backward, Roger
Caillois suggested the fantastic emerged from a kind of subconscious
passivity and was itself a medium-like activity on the part of the writer:
“The fantastic must have something of the involuntary about it, some-
thing submitted to—an interrogation as troubled as it is troublesome,
rising suddenly from a darkness which its author was obliged to take
just as it came” (qtd. in Todorov 35). Truly, the powerful push and pull
of subterranean energy is vibrant in many fantastic texts; however, to
assume passive transmission on the writer’s part neglects her agency as
well as the reader’s own necessary participation in the psychic scene. The
reader’s countertransference is a “part” of the text rather than a result.
We claim “to fantastic” as a verb, for creating in the fantastic mode is
an action that has tremendous power to open up space for new embod-
iments, identities, and relationships in a world now possible to view in
nonbinary multiple vision. Though Christine Brooke-Rose cites one fea-
ture of the genre as a “total ambiguity between two interpretations,” we
argue that often two is reductive (65). Things are and are not and could
be and were and might have been and would have been and should be.
Past and present and future blur, as do lines between gender identities
and even categories of being. Entering the powerful activity of the fantas-
tic through the creative text exposes some of its more potent capabilities.
Guimar identified this effect, which he terms l’insolite, as emerging out
of endless negation: “dissolution, disrepair, disintegration, derangement,
dilapidation, sliding away, emptying” (qtd. in Jackson 25). And yet this
string of negations can as easily be a string of incomplete additions, su-
perimpositions, transubstantiations, and other forms of multiplied and
shifting alternatives.
As a noun, the fantastic is a genre of texts and a category of more-
or-less supernatural-seeming phenomena. It can be differentially cate-
gorized through structuralist taxonomies, such as the foundational ones
used by Tzvetan Todorov. His approach underpins so much of the theo-
retical literature on the fantastic that the genre itself has been tied up in
many ways by its definitional brackets, or more interestingly in trying to
question them. It is necessary of course to have some definition—some
genre-defining litmus test—for the fantastic, left to its own devices, flits
like a hummingbird between the poles of naturalism and supernatural
excess. In this way, it functions as “not so much an evanescent genre
as an evanescent element” (Brooke-Rose 63). Indeed, most texts in the
genre ultimately fail to “stick the landing” and wobble into either of the
abutting genres.
Not only does the genre ubiquitously fail to cohere, but any sense
of narrative time is also shaken in the fantastic. Jackson argues,
“[c]hronological time is similarly exploded, with time past, present, and
future losing their historical sequence and tending toward a suspension,
xx Toward a Female Fantastic
an eternal present” (47). Jack Halberstam approaches time in distinctly
nonnormative ways, defining “queer time” as “specific models of tem-
porality…[outside] the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and
family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (6). In addition to the
explicit time travel found in some pieces, energy moves queerly, so to
speak, across planes of time in these stories. Indeed, the only fixed point
in chronology is the genre’s particular “hesitation” on the part of char-
acters and readers, which “cannot be situated, by and large, except in
the present” (Todorov 42).
The tension between a present-tense questioning and the situational
flux of time within texts can perhaps be approached by way of Derrida’s
theory of hauntology:

To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to intro-

duce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every con-
cept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what
we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in
a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration.
(202)

Even Derrida’s language—wherein he’s arguing for the virtual omnipres-

ence of Marx’s ghosts across modern Europe—invokes the rhetoric of
the fantastic. In many ways, his notion of haunting is about occupying a
liminal space, one consistently between absence and presence. The fan-
tastic, in the 1890s and 1920s, explores and exploits this liminality.
Given the substantial scholarship dedicated to non-realist represen-
tations written by men, this collection specifically explores women-­
identified and nonbinary authors’ use of the fantastic. The writers
examined across our chapters used narratively polymorphous supernat-
ural subgenres to dramatize their particularly activist arguments and
ideas. This provided the flexibility to explore the unspoken and often
unspeakable realities of both the external and internal world. Not only
did these writers wield the easy strategic cover of these forms to sub-
vert the status quo, but they also used them to explore the gendered
psyche’s links to imagination; pathology; and creative, personal, and
erotic agency. In addition to providing dynamic presentations of female
and gender-queer subjectivity, these texts also illuminate intriguing and
complex relationships to key moments in gender(ed) history.
In recent years, there has been a spike in scholarly and popular interest
in the supernatural and fantastic literature. The most recent publications
on the topic fall into one of two categories: studies limited by national
borders and narrow time period constraints and studies of contempo-
rary fantasy literature and film. In the first category, many of the recent
publications on the supernatural are limited in their scopes based on
traditional understandings of national literary canons (Jeffrey Andrew
 Toward a Female Fantastic xxi
Weinstock’s Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women
(2008) and Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford’s collection The
Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947 (2018)), literary periods
(Riccardo Capoferro’s Empirical Wonder: Historicizing the Fantas-
tic, 1660–1760 (2010) and David Sandner’s Critical Discourses of the
­Fantastic, 1712–1831 (2011)), or an emphasis on male fantastic authors
­( Jason Marc Harris’s Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century
British Fiction (2008)). While Sandner’s volume dedicates two out of
twelve chapters to women writers, the very canonical Mary Shelley and
Anne Radcliffe, neither Capoferro nor Harris examines a single female
author at length. Hilary Grimes’s The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental
Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing (2011) similarly focuses
on canonical male authors such as Henry James, Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, and George Du Maurier. Although she dedicates chapters to
Vernon Lee and Sarah Grand, Grimes uses the ghost stories of W.T.
Stead as the ­focal point of a chapter that is ostensibly about women
ghost story writers, focusing on female characters in male-authored
texts instead of female-­authored fiction. Jen Cadwallader’s Spirits and
Spirituality in Victorian Fiction (2016) shares Grimes’s emphasis on ca-
nonical male figures (Le Fanu, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and
Henry James) and limits her discussion of the supernatural to ghost
stories instead of adopting the more expansive notion of the fantastic
that we take on in our collection. The Ashgate Research Companion to
Nineteenth-­Century ­Spiritualism and the Occult (2012), edited by Sarah
A. ­Willburn and ­Tatiana ­Kontou, takes an encyclopedic approach to the
nineteenth-­century occult, combining analyses of popular supernatural
literature with historical ­overviews of Victorian pseudoscience, mesmer-
ism, séances, and supernatural figures. While this is an invaluable re-
source for scholars and readers who are interested in nineteenth-century
spiritualism, it lacks the specific focus on female-authored fiction that
our collection has as its guiding principle.
Much of the scholarship on the literary fantastic focuses solely on the
nineteenth century. While Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment (2004)
and Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World: Spiritualism and P ­ sychical
Research in England, 1850–1914 (1988) extend the critical conversation
surrounding the fantastic to 1914, the bulk of these texts focus on the fin
de siècle. Helen Sword’s Ghostwriting Modernism (2002) extends this
chronology by tracing the influence of paranormal, spiritualist, and oc-
cult practices and beliefs on writers from James Joyce to Sylvia Plath, yet
her analysis is primarily focused on canonical, male modernist ­figures.
Pamela Thurschwell’s foundational study, Literature, ­Technology, and
Magical Thinking (2001), similarly pushes the traditional timeline even
further into the 1920s but is still limited in the sense that the major-
ity of the authors examined are male, with close readings focusing on
George Du Maurier, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James. The few studies
xxii Toward a Female Fantastic
that examine the role of the supernatural in modernist fiction are pre-
occupied with the influence of Eastern mysticism on high modernism
(John Bramble’s Modernism and the Occult (2014)) or canonical male
authors. John Attridge and Rod Rosenquist’s edited collection Incredible
Modernism: Literature, Trust, and Deception (2013) features only two
chapters on female authors, H.D. and Gertrude Stein, and addresses the
occult only briefly in its examination of narrative experimentation and
reader response. Luke Thurston’s Literary Ghosts from the V ­ ictorians
to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (2015) presents perhaps the most
sustained analysis of female-authored modernist supernatural fiction,
examining Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and May Sinclair within
the context of the modern, psychological ghost story.
In the second category, four recently published volumes examine the
relationship between women authors and the genre of fantasy: Katherine
J. Reese’s Feminist Narrative and the Supernatural: The Function of
Fantastic Devices in Seven Recent Novels (2008), Dana Percec’s edited
collection Reading the Fantastic Imagination: The Avatars of a Literary
Genre, (2014), Lori M. Campbell’s A Quest of Her Own: Essays on
the Female Hero in Modern Fantasy (2014), and Lauren J. Lacey’s The
Past That Might Have Been, the Future That May Come: Women Writ-
ing Fantastic Fiction, 1960s to the Present (2014). While these studies
focus on the contemporary preoccupation with fantastic tales such as
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, our collection traces the genealogy
of this creative impulse, suggesting that just as the twenty-first century
has experienced a fantastic turn, so too did the decades of the 1890s and
1920s. This resurgence in fantastic fiction is proof that supports one of
our primary theses that the supernatural mode, especially as adopted by
female-identified authors, has never disappeared from the literary imag-
ination but rather waxed or waned according to the social, political, and
cultural pressures of the time. The only recent publication that takes
a comparative approach to supernatural literature is Barbara ­Brodman
and James E. Doan’s collection The Supernatural Revamped: From
Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic (2016). ­However,
this collection places nineteenth-century fantasy in conversation with
modern rewritings and, unlike the current volume, does not focus on the
gendered significance of these narrative experiments.
In many ways, this collection fills the gap between these two group-
ings of texts: first, by focusing on the oft-overlooked women writers in
the genre and second, by providing the historical foundation for their
explorations of the supernatural as a modern literary mode that is par-
ticularly suited to female writers.4 Further, by placing two decades that
are not usually studied together into conversation, the essays that follow
extend the discussion of the fantastic literary genre beyond traditional
understandings of literary periods and national canons, reinvigorating
a conversation that has been typically seen as distinctly Victorian or
 Toward a Female Fantastic xxiii
modern but not both. Discussing the complicated and gendered issue of
periodization, Holly Laird posits that

[p]eriodization works differently when the perspective shifts from

a dominant group to a marginalized one, and whereas Victorian
male writers decisively shaped their work in contradistinction to the
­Romantics, and Modernist men to the Victorian, women writers
were inclined to admit continuities.
(8)

Although referring specifically to British literature from 1880 to 1920,

Laird’s claim holds true for the women authors analyzed here, and the
following chapters seek to blur the disciplinary lines that have become
entrenched in literary scholarship. The pairing of the 1890s and 1920s
enables this project to approach literary history in a fundamentally dia-
logic way. Certainly, putting these two decades in conversation encour-
ages us to treat fin-de-siècle literature as a predecessor for modernist
literature. Perhaps more interestingly, though, these readings of texts
from the interwar period of the 1920s encourage a reflexive look back-
ward, contextualizing the concerns of women at the end of the n­ ineteenth
century and building a broader, dynamic lineage of supernatural repre-
sentations in literature.
Literary periodization itself has long been understood as revolving
around “a single (male) genius-oriented academic milieu,” with canons
organized “around a few men’s literary peaks” (Laird 17). Thus, women-­
authored texts are often relegated to footnotes or second thoughts as
scholars pay lip service to gender diversity by “mixing a few women
writers in among men in traditional period clusters and by focusing on
women writers who remained well-known despite their general absence
from school curricula” (Laird 9). Scholarship on these respective periods
often incorporates female-identified authors as singular, tokenized rep-
resentations of a monolithic women’s literature; thus, Elizabeth Bowen
is frequently a stand-in for all Irish, women modernists, while other less
canonized writers fall by the critical wayside. This scholarly trend is
especially apparent in discussions of the literary fantastic and is made
clear in the extensive and detailed chronology that introduces The Cam-
bridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (2012). Tracing the founda-
tional fantastic texts and authors from the inception of the genre, which
editors Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn date as 800 A.D. with the
writing of Beowulf, to the present day, the timeline includes a fair share
of women writers over the course of its expansive time span. However,
surprisingly few women appear between 1880 and 1929; only Marie
Corelli, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Nesbit, Beatrix Potter, Hope
Mirrlees, and Virginia Woolf are noted as making significant contri-
butions to the genre during the four decades that are typically viewed
xxiv Toward a Female Fantastic
as marking a heyday not only for the ghost story but also for women’s
writing more generally.5 The duality in this collection allows for a recu-
peration of some of those less familiar but still substantive figures. Not
only do we seek to showcase the work of women writers, but our collec-
tion also examines the work of noncanonical and lesser-known authors,
including Katharine Burdekin, Margery Lawrence, E.Œ. Somerville
and Martin Ross, and Clemence Housman. As a result, our collection
provides a glimpse into “the great unread” and attempts to reintroduce
once-popular nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers
into the canon of supernatural literature.

Gender in the 1890s: The New Woman

That the decade of the 1890s was a period of radical transformation, es-
pecially for women in general and women writers in particular, is now a
critical commonplace. While the fin de siècle was once viewed as simply
the tail end of the Victorian era and a short interlude before the rise of
modernism, critics now see the final decades of the nineteenth ­century
as a watershed moment in women’s history. As Holly Laird posits,
“[r]evolutionary hopes and fears set these turn-of-the-century years apart
from both mid-Victorian and wartime England, and they constitute a
coherent historical episode in women’s writing” (1). From the formation
of numerous women’s trade and political unions (Women’s Trade Union
League 1890, Society of Women’s Journalists 1894, National Union
of Women’s Workers 1895, and National Union of Women’s Suffrage
­Societies 1897) to the rise of the New Woman, the final decade of the
nineteenth century presented new opportunities for women to step out
of the domestic sphere and into the public eye. In 1894, perhaps in re-
sponse to this new visibility, the terms “New Woman” and “feminism”
entered the English language and the image of a “middle-class women
who rode bicycles, smoked in public, and sought professional employ-
ment and legal rights” became a simultaneously feared, ridiculed, and
admired figure (Hager 60).6 With this “New Woman,” and by extension
“New Woman Fiction,” came new anxieties, and topics that were once
relegated to the bedroom were now being debated in courtrooms and in
the press. As Pamela Thurschwell notes,

the 1890s is also a decade in which anxieties about the permeabil-

ity and suggestibility of bodies and minds erupts in crises around
sexuality. Sexual and gender panic manifests itself in represen-
tative figures such as the New Woman and the dandy, in public
scandals such as Oscar Wilde’s trials, and in the reification of
medicalizing, pathologizing, and criminalizing discourses around
homosexuality.
(2)
 Toward a Female Fantastic xxv
These anxieties would become even more pronounced after the pub-
lication of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in Psychology of Sex in 1897, usher-
ing in the Anglophone study and discussion of sexology.7 His depiction
of the lesbian, “classified as ‘homosexual’ precisely those forms of be-
haviour for which spinster feminists, the ‘New Women’ of the 1890s,
were criticised by anti-feminists” (Jeffreys 106). Among the “psychic
abnormalities” Ellis aligns with lesbianism are direct speech, athleti-
cism, “disdain” for both “the petty feminine artifaces of the toilet,” and
“needlework and other domestic occupations” (250). Female indepen-
dence, outside of a passive and limited set of traits, was pathologized,
yet women fought to embrace more political and personal opportunities.
So, with the turn of the century, the radical energies of the New Woman
would become the political agitation of the suffragette.

The Missing Decades: First-Wave Feminism and

Women’s Writing
Of course, this collection’s choice of decades focuses away from the inter-
vening years, 1900–1920. Clearly, this was a rich time in women’s literary
and cultural history. Marked by what Edwardian critic Frederic Taber
Cooper called “the prevailing spirit of feminine unrest,” women’s social
and literary activity were explicit interests of the age (qtd. in Miller 3).
However, we note a certain overtness of Edwardian literary activism,
rather than the covert manipulation of the fantastic. During this time,
women writers, including many of those who made exceptional contribu-
tions to the fantastic before or after this era, were not particularly engaged
in supernatural modes. In these years, many began agitating far more
publicly and directly for legal and political rights, through the formation
of leagues like the Women Writers Suffrage League in Britain and the
creation of feminist journals, such as Women’s Franchise (1909–1920),
Votes for Women (1907–1918), Common Cause (1909–1920), The
­Suffragette (1912–1915), Freewoman (1911–1912), and Woman’s
Leader (1920–1932).
During this period, documentary realism was often used in order to
give activist writers an air of authenticity; “[d]oing justice to the ‘real’
girl and the ‘real’ world and discovering truthful social reality” became
the focus for women writers in the early decades of the twentieth century
(Park 179). Women writers crafted key political texts of suffrage, such as
Myrna Loy’s 1914 “Feminist Manifesto” and May Sinclair’s Feminism,
a pamphlet published by the Women’s Suffrage League in 1912. Literary
genres grew to include suffrage drama and the marriage problem novel.8
However, there is one notable exception: during this period, the feminist
utopian novel, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), saw
a surge of popularity. Yet these texts, which more straightforwardly par-
ticipate in the suffragette agendas of their authors, are not necessarily
xxvi Toward a Female Fantastic
supernatural, only non-realist. Despite this turn to realism in writing,
the public activism and protest methods of the radical suffragettes, who
still embodied traditional outward forms of femininity while simultane-
ously acting in ways antithetical to those ideals, in some ways anticipate
the literary device of estrangement that is a hallmark of fantastic fiction:

Since the overall effect of this procedure on the public was to be one
of shock, one had to wrench elements of everyday life from their
original contexts, denuding them of their familiarity and thereby
stirring the beholder from a state of passivity into an active and
critical posture. This method is, in essence, identical to the artistic
technique developed more self-consciously by other contemporaries
now grouped under the umbrella of “modernists.”
(Park 174)

Just as writers of the fantastic render the everyday extraordinary

through haunted and otherworldly objects and spaces, suffragettes de-
familiarized and radicalized the concept of the feminine. Edwardian
­suffragettes, many educated, employed, and enjoying alternative life-
styles, ­“distinguished themselves from their foremothers by their great
willingness to discuss and tackle—in public—problems relating to sex
and sexuality” (Kent Sex 21). Their radical openness would become nor-
malized in the crisis to come.

World War I and Shifts in Gender and Sex

With the onset of World War I, people, especially in Europe, were sud-
denly faced with the effects of global conflict, the scale and scope of
which had literally never been seen before. As Susan Kingsley Kent ex-
plains, “…soldiers and civilians, men and women, elites and common-
ers, victors and vanquished alike, faced disorder in every aspect of their
lives” (“Love” 153). Indeed, the palpable momentum of the suffrage
movement was undoubtedly complicated by the Great War: “Suffrage’s
most visible leaders, the Pankhursts, called a halt to the movement
with the onset of WWI” (Laird 2). Despite the significant demand for
the right to vote, more pressing concerns about survival in the face of
­expansive international warfare disrupted the progression of the move-
ment. However, the war itself provided young women—and other mar-
ginalized groups, at times—various opportunities that surfaced only
within its context.
The New Woman of the 1890s was replaced by the multitude of work-
ing women, filling positions left vacant in the workforce by men shipped
off to fight. During the war, “approximately 200,000 women moved
from domestic labor into the munitions industry…for shorter hours and
better pay” (Linett 4). From munitions workers to nurses to ambulance
 Toward a Female Fantastic xxvii
drivers, women’s social and economic autonomy was broadened ag-
gressively by the circumstances of the war: “Women in hospitals and
at the front frequently commented upon the similarities they felt with
the fighting men, evincing a solidarity or comradeship with them that
overrode all distinctions” (Kent “Love” 165). The blurring or erasure
of gender(ed) distinctions carved out spaces for nonnormative gender
presentation. As Sandra M. Gilbert suggests,

For many women…whose inability to identify with conventional

‘femininity’ had always made their gender a problem to them, the
war facilitated not just a liberation from the constricting trivia of
parlors and petticoats but an unprecedented transcendence of the
profounder constraints imposed by traditional sex roles.
(441)

The subversion of those “traditional” roles—which were surveilled and

regulated heavily before the war—extend beyond gender and into sexu-
ality. In “Capitalism in Gay Identity,” historian John D’Emilio discusses
the influence of World War I on the visibility of queer people:

The war severely disrupted traditional patterns of gender relations

and sexuality, and temporarily created a new erotic situation con-
ducive to homosexual expression. It plucked millions of young
men and women, whose sexual identities were just forming, out of
their homes, out of towns and small cities, out of the heterosexual
­environment of the family, and dropped them into sex-segregated
situations […] The war freed women from the settings where hetero-
sexuality was normally imposed. For men and women already gay,
it provided an opportunity to meet people like themselves. Others
could become gay because of the temporary freedom to explore sex-
uality that the war provided.
(106–107)9

Such freedom was manifest perhaps most visibly in wardrobe—with

women having access and permission to don more masculine attire in
and out of the workplace. The lifting of said limitations extended, in-
terestingly, beyond the period of the war; Laura Doan writes, “[t]he
meaning of clothing in the decade after the first world war, a time of
unprecedented cultural confusion over gender and sexual identities, was
a good deal more fluid than fixed” (96). From the middle of the war
through the 1920s, she explains, “masculine clothing was extraordi-
narily transformative for women at this time” (64).
Perhaps most interestingly, even as women had access to more freedom
and responsibility, the war itself was actively reinforcing heightened con-
ventional masculinities. Given that pro-war propaganda in England, in
xxviii Toward a Female Fantastic
particular, used “imagery of sexual violation” as “a means of recruitment
and justification for the war, it comes as no surprise that there were overt
connections made between nationalism and manhood” (Kent “Love” 159):

While the War permitted women to all sorts of things which had been
regarded as strictly masculine before the War, it required of men a
more extreme form of masculine activity which was prohibited even
to men during peacetime: not merely violence, but savage murder
in battle. The war re-asserted gender distinctions that women had
been contesting: women were frail and had to be defended by strong
protectors, who were prepared to kill or die on their behalf.
(Tylee 253–254)

In many ways, World War I was a gendered paradox; on the one hand,
the war itself was framed in terms of mythically heroic men fighting for
the virtue of the helpless women they left at home; on the other hand,
those women were often actively working to support the war effort. Al-
though some liberties were granted to women after the conclusion of the
war, Bruley notes that there was a revival of conservative, regulatory
gender norms as well:

Integral to this resurgence of conservative values was the necessity

of reasserting gender divisions, separate spheres ideology and, after
the war losses, an insistence on the need for women to procreate…
the war did not bring about any fundamental changes in women’s
position in society. It did, however, bring women into the public
domain more than ever before.
(70)

Labor historian Mary Macarthur wrote in 1918 that

Of all the changes worked by the war none has been greater than
the change in the status and position of women: and yet it is not so
much that women herself has changed, as that man’s conception of
her has changed.
(qtd. in Braybon 157)

In some ways, the postwar reaction to women is a byproduct of

­ acarthur’s claim; whereas women’s social and public mobility was
M
temporarily sanctioned by the war effort, broader concerns about pro-
priety led to the sweeping affirmation of traditional values and a seeming
restoration of a prewar gendered ideal.10 In light of the shift in gendered
culture, as Jeffreys points out,

the face of feminism in the 1920s was very different from that of the
militant suffrage movement before the First World War. The politics
 Toward a Female Fantastic xxix
of direct action and the campaign to change men’s sexual behavior
were replaced by a form of equal rights feminism which offered no
direct challenge to men’s dominance ….
(147)

Female Mediation: Spiritualism and the Occult

Putting these two decades into conversation reveals a similar pattern in
public interest in supernatural and spiritualist practices in the modern
era. As Alex Owen’s work suggests, the tremendous interest in the occult
that characterized many literary and artistic circles during the fin de siè-
cle has all but been ignored. While many historians and literary critics
have examined spiritualism through a feminist lens, arguing that the
role of the spirit medium, which was predominantly played by women,
offered a new and powerful space for female voices, these studies of-
ten focus solely on the first incarnation of the spiritualist phenomenon
in the mid-nineteenth century, specifically the 1850s and 1860s.11 This
traditional timeline ignores the fact that by 1897 the movement boasted
nearly eight million followers in Britain and the United States. With the
creation of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882 and
the rise of mystical revival societies such as the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn in the 1890s, the final decades of the nineteenth century
saw a shift in the way that spiritualism, in particular, and supernatural
beliefs, in general, were understood by the public. No longer a fringe
movement relegated to the domestic sphere of the private séance circle,
the supernatural became a scientific and quasi-professional pursuit.
This second burst of interest in the supernatural and the occult, like
its previous incarnation, was particularly attractive to female believers
and practitioners. With Madame Helena Blavatsky’s arrival in London
in 1887, Theosophy’s “heady mix of Neo-Platonism, Buddhism, and
­Kabbalistic mysticism” not only reacted against “the rise of ­Darwinism
and a society increasingly devoted to scientific and technological pro-
cesses” but also allowed women like Annie Besant to marry their ded-
ication to the campaign for women’s rights to the desire for spiritual
rejuvenation (Ingman 187). At the turn of the century, “committed
advocates of social transformation…were often as concerned with the
idea of spiritual regeneration as political change” (Owen 23). However,
while interest in spiritualism and the occult often signaled a concomitant
interest in progressive social agendas, occultism also had the potential
to mask more radical feminist desires behind a more traditional under-
standing of “women’s place in the moral and temporal order of things”
(Owen 87). Thus, the Victorian idea of the “angel in the house” and the
empty vessel of the passive female medium become strategic cover for
radical answers to the “woman question.”
The notion that women were especially attuned to otherworldly and
unseen forces was supported by “science” when William James, not long
xxx Toward a Female Fantastic
after the publication of his seminal Principles of Psychology in 1890, ad-
dressed the Society for Psychical Research in 1896, claiming that “things
that registered as real entities by the ‘feminine-mystical mind’ remained
invisible to the ‘scientific-academic mind’ supposedly characteristic of
the Victorian male” (Thurston 100).12 As Heather Ingman contends,

the alliance of spirituality and feminism was empowering, as is ev-

idenced in the work of New Woman writers at the turn of the cen-
tury, when writers like Sarah Grand and George Egerton took up
the theme of women’s superior spiritual powers in fiction that fore-
shadows the modernist aesthetics with its emphasis on dreams, the
subconscious, and formal stylistic experimentation.
(187)

This alignment of the feminine with the mystical is furthered in the 1920s
as women writers and scholars turned their attention to the supernatural
powers of women, primitivism, and paganism. With the publication of
Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) and Margaret Murray’s
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), traditional androcentric my-
thologies were revised through a feminist lens, replacing the pessimism
of T.S. Eliot and James Frazer’s conceptualizations of the Grail legend
with an emphasis on rebirth, fertility, nature, and the female body.13 This
thread is picked up and expanded upon by H.D. in her autobiographical
prose work HERmione (1927) and the novels of Mary Butts, especially
Armed with Madness (1928). However, at the same time that the occult
offered a sort of mystical liberation for women, ­spiritualism and belief in
the supernatural were linked by scientists to distinctly feminine disorders:
“Eminent doctors diagnosed spiritualism as a pathology linked to trans-
gressions of the home, including child-abandonment, intense erotic de-
sire, a tendency to refuse orders issued by husbands and extreme religious
piety, and named the condition ‘uteromania’” (Killeen 83). ­Spiritualism
was simultaneously visibly liberating and distinctly limiting for women,
adding to the troubling paradoxical experience of women.
Although spiritualism’s popularity appears to have waned during the
early decades of the twentieth century, with interest in debunking me-
diums and spirit manifestations taking precedence in the popular press,
belief in the supernatural surged after the mass casualties of World
War I and the epidemic of the Spanish Influenza. As Jenny Hazelgrove
argues in Spiritualism and British Society Between the Wars (2000),
“[s]­piritualism was every bit as popular during the interwar period as
it had been in the previous century” (2). Faced with the inexplicable
horrors of trench warfare and mechanized violence, many soldiers and
loved ones left on the home front turned to séances, spirit circles, and
automatic writing to make sense of a world that could no longer be
explained in conventional theological terms. In Sites of Memory, Sites
 Toward a Female Fantastic xxxi
of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995), Jay
Winter examines how supernatural stories, superstitions, and beliefs
proliferated among soldiers as a way to make sense of the often uncanny
experience of war (65). The British-born American psychical researcher
Hereward Carrington complied many of these supernatural accounts in
Psychical Phenomena and the War (1918), a volume that was popular
with both soldiers and those mourning on the home front. According to
Winter, spiritualism became one of the most “powerful means by which
the living ‘saw’ the dead of the Great War, and used their ‘return’ to help
survivors cope with their loss and their trauma” (54).14
In addition, Freud’s widely read 1919 “The Uncanny” inspired many,
including Virginia Woolf—whose publishing house released Alix and
James Strachey’s translation of his collected works in 1920—and May
Swanson, to take up fantastic modes in their exploration of human char-
acter. The intermingling of the occult with psychoanalysis is also evident
in the very name of May Sinclair’s 1923 collection Uncanny Stories.
While Freud’s work inspired literary experimentation, he himself was
also interested in the occult. It is often cited that in 1921 Freud received
three invitations to coedit periodicals dedicated to the investigation of
the occult. Although he refused each offer, he allegedly wrote to one of
the editors that “If I had my life to live over again I should devote myself
to psychical research rather than psychoanalysis” (Jones 3:391–392).
While some scholars, and even Freud himself, denied the truth of this
admission, the connection between psychoanalysis and the fantastic in
the early decades of the twentieth century cannot be denied. While many
studies of the supernatural gloss over or ignore what Owen refers to as
the age of “modern enchantment” to highlight the more rational scien-
tific developments of the twentieth century, this collection suggests that
the fantastic and the rational were not mutually exclusive during the
interwar period.

What Follows
As this volume covers a wide range of topics—including werewolves,
mummies, fairies, devils, time travel, ghosts, race, gender, queerness,
monstrosity, madness, incest, empire, psychology, and science—across
two seemingly disparate decades, our organization reflects a commit-
ment to understand the genre in action and to actively place chapters
focusing on different decades into conversation. For these reasons, the
chapters in this collection are not arranged by the chronology of their
subjects but rather organized into four topical categories: considerations
of supernaturally loaded objects, transformative and uncanny spaces,
fantastic representations of othered peoples, and a reimagined feminist
personae dramatis filled with supernatural creatures. Each section opens
with an introduction to the topic written by a scholar who provides a
xxxii Toward a Female Fantastic
historical and synthetic vision of an aspect of the fantastic’s mode across
the decades and places their chapters into context and conversation.
Opening with Jill Galvan’s introduction, the section on “Fantastic
­Objects” focuses on ordinary things reimagined as supernatural. From
reanimated portraits to lifelike automatons, this section sets the stage for
the way that everyday concerns about the domestic underscore national
and global anxieties regarding economics and empire as well as more in-
dividual concerns related to gender and sexuality. Luke Thurston begins
the section on “Fantastic Spaces” with special attention to the role of
psychoanalysis and politics in considering the fantastic place. The chap-
ters that follow pay particular attention to the reframing of spaces as
the sites on which not only supernatural but also personal and politi-
cal experiences are staged. This section engages with three distinct types
of spaces—­domestic, national/colonial, and imaginary/­supernatural—­
focusing on both the ways that the fantastic relies on place as a founda-
tional component and the ways that setting is made magical. Considering
what it would mean to be a “fantastic” human, Scott Rogers introduces
­“Fantastic ­People” through historical consideration of mediums and the
ways spiritualism opened other avenues for human possibility. The chap-
ters in this section approach the reconfiguration of individuals as beyond
human. In distinct ways, the texts in question here drastically reconfig-
ure the boundaries of what constitutes being human without delving
into a new species designation. These chapters interrogate the role of
the modern woman in a variety of ways: through resistance to gender
norms, challenges to marital expectations, and portraits of a racialized
other. From werewolves and mummies to beasts, the chapters in “Fan-
tastic ­Creatures,” introduced by Jessica DeCoux, argue for the signif-
icance of supernatural bodies that surfaced long before the booming
contemporary interest in the otherworldly, as evident in popular litera-
ture and culture.

Notes
1 In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn claims that “[t]he debate over
definitions is now long-standing, and a consensus has emerged, accepting as
a viable ‘fuzzy set,’ a range of definitions of fantasy” (xiii).
2 We are working from the model in which texts (and readers) can be “queered.”
Eve Sedgwick, in her foundational text, Tendencies (1993), ­explains queer
theory as “…the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, dissonances and ­resonances,
lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent e­ lements of anyone’s
gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify mono-
lithically” (8). To queer, in many ways, is to destabilize; to fantastic, along
those lines, is to embed, to multiply, to subvert.
3 See Ellenberger’s History of the Unconscious and McCormick’s Proteus of
the Mind for a full history of these developments.
4 We are aware of the slipperiness in our use between “female-identified,”
“non-binary,” “genderqueer,” and “women.” We hope that this collection as
a whole—and the introduction, specifically—contextualizes the complicated
 Toward a Female Fantastic xxxiii
nature of gender in this regard and that our intentions are read as inclusive of
all historical female-of-center identities.
5 As “fantasy” at large is not equivalent to “the fantastic,” the works of
­B eatrix Potter and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are beyond the scope of this
book because they are patently and unquestionably on the “marvellous”
side of Todorov’s metric. In other words, in both utopian fiction and chil-
dren’s literature, the supernatural is an uncomplicated given of the text and
not subject to epistemological “hesitation.” It should also be noted that the
collection examines Nesbit’s works for children, rather than her fantastic
writing for adults covered in The Female Fantastic.
6 The term “New Woman” is traditionally believed to have been coined
during a debate between Sarah Grand and Ouida. More than simply a
“overeducated mannish creature affecting ‘rational dress’ and much
­
given to the masculine pursuits of smoking and serious reading,” the
New Woman was also associated with “aberrant sexuality, either an
unhealthy ­ renunciation of motherhood or the challenging of conven-
tional s­ ociosexual codes that were intrinsic to the so-called New Woman
­Fiction” (Owen 86).
7 While Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) is credited
with creating the field of sexology, Havelock Ellis is often credited with
bringing the field into more public discourse in England.
8 As Sowon Park notes
[w]omen’s writing and political engagement have always been evi-
dently mutually dependent. Between 1890 and 1920, for example, the
first-wave feminist movement ignited a veritable explosion of literature
­written about, by, and for women. In the form of poetry, sketched plays,
­burlesques, polemical essays, tracts, articles, short stories, and novels,
feminist activism generated an unprecedented amount and range of
literature.
(173)
9 This freedom was not without its backlash: Sue Bruley contextualizes legal
reactions to the surge in visible queerness during and after the war:
In 1921, no doubt as another consequence of the post-war backlash, an
attempt was made to make lesbianism a criminal offence as was male
homosexuality. After passing through the Commons, the move met prob-
lems in the House of Lords, where members were caught between the
desire to condemn it and the fear that if they acknowledged its existence
it might convert women to it.
(78)
10 An interesting counterpoint to the resurgence of conservative gender norms
in the 1920s is the proliferation of the image of the flapper: the modern girl-
ish rebel who embraced the excesses of the age, within reason, bridging the
gap between respectability and rebellion. Zeitz argues that the flapper was
no mere creation of the press but
distinctly real...gainfully employed and earning her own keep, free from
family and community surveillance … the New Woman of the 1920s
boldly asserted her right to dance, drink, smoke and date—to work, to
own her own property, to live free of the strictures that governed her
mother’s generation.
(8)
See also Simon’s Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper.
xxxiv Toward a Female Fantastic
11 See Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism
in Late Victorian England; Marlene Tromp, Altered States: Sex, Nation,
Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism; and Alison ­Winter,
Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain.
12 For more on James’s address, see William James and Psychical Research,
edited by G. Murphy and R. Ballon and David Seed, “Psychical Cases:
Transformations of the Supernatural in Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair”
in Gothic Modernisms, edited by A. Smith and J. Wallace.
13 Of course, no discussion is complete without mention of Jane Harrison’s
groundbreaking studies published slightly earlier, such as Themis: A Study
of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912, revised 1927), which r­ eveal
the matrifocal origins of Greek religious life. See Jean Mills’s Virginia Woolf,
Jane Ellen Harrison and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism for more on the
relationships between this thought and women’s literary production.
14 Perhaps one of the most famous wartime converts to spiritualism was Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, who became interested in spirit photography and at-
tended séances after the death of his son Kingsley in 1918. Although Conan
Doyle was previously interested in the occult, even joining the Society for
Psychical Research in 1893, the large-scale death and devastation of World
War I led him to publicly declare his belief in spiritualism in 1916 and he
later became an evangelist of sorts, leading a successful lecture tour of the
USA and Australia in 1919 and helping to found a spiritualist church in
London in 1923. For more on Conan Doyle’s involvement with spiritualism,
see Stefan Bechtel and Laurence Roy Stains, Through a Glass, Darkly: Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle and the Quest to Solve the Greatest Mystery of All.

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List of Contributors

Nicholas Daly is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at

University College Dublin, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
His work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and drama
includes The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century
City: Paris, London, New York (Cambridge University Press, 2015),
Literature, Technology and Modernity: 1860–2000 (Cambridge
University Press, 2004), and Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de
Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914 (Cambridge
University Press, 1999); and the Oxford World's Classics edition of
The Scarlet Pimpernel (2018). He is currently completing ­Ruritania:
A Cultural History, from The Prisoner of Zenda to the Princess
­Diaries (OUP). He serves on the advisory boards of the Journal of
Victorian Culture, Novel, and the Irish University Review.
Jessica DeCoux is completing her dissertation, “Margin in Every Sense”:
Nineteenth-Century Decadence and Popular Culture, at The Graduate
Center, City University of New York, and is an instructor of English and
composition at CUNY’s New York City College of Technology. Her
specialization is in late nineteenth-century British decadence and
popular fiction. Other publications include the essay “Marie Corelli,
Wormwood, and the Diversity of Decadence,” published in Cahiers
Victoriens et Édouardiens.
Anne DeLong is an Associate Professor of English at Kutztown Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-­century
British literature and women’s studies. She received her Ph.D. in
­English from Lehigh University. DeLong is the author of Mesmerism,
Medusa, and the Muse: The Romantic Discourse of Spontaneous
Creativity (Lexington Books, 2012), Classic Horror: A Historical
Exploration of Literature and The Victorian World: A ­Historical
­E xploration of Literature (both forthcoming from ABC-CLIO/
Greenwood Books). She is currently working on a research mono-
graph, tentatively titled Haunted Narratives: The Subversive Super-
natural in Ghost Stories by Victorian Women Writers. She has also
published a critical edition of Marie Corelli’s first novel, A Romance
xl List of Contributors
of Two Worlds (Zittaw Press, 2011). DeLong is coeditor of The Jour-
nal of Dracula Studies and President of the Transylvanian Society of
Dracula.
Melissa Edmundson is Lecturer of English at Clemson University and spe-
cializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British women writ-
ers, with particular interest in women’s ghost stories. She received her
Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. She
is the editor of two critical editions, Alice Perrin’s East of Suez (1901),
published by Victorian Secrets Press in 2011, and a Broadview Edition
of Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Half-Caste (1851) published in 2016.
She is the author of Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-­Century
Britain (University of Wales Press, 2013) and Women’s Colonial
Gothic Writing, 1850–1930: Haunted Empire (Palgrave Macmillan,
2018). Her other work on women’s supernatural fiction includes an ar-
ticle on the First World War ghost stories of H.D. Everett for a special
issue of Women’s Writing, as well as a chapter on women writers and
ghost stories for The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story.
Elizabeth English is a Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff Metropol-
itan University in Wales. She received her Ph.D. in English Literature
from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses
on modernist and early twentieth-century popular fiction with a par-
ticular interest in women’s writing. Her first monograph, Lesbian
Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction (Edinburgh
University Press, 2015) explores the aesthetic dilemma prompted
by the censorship of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness
and argues that popular genre fictions offered a creative strategy for
women writers representing lesbian identity and desire by protecting
them against the threat of detection and punishment. She is also the
Treasurer for the Modernist Network Cymru (MONC), which brings
together scholars and professionals working on modernism in Wales
to encourage collaboration and communication.
Jill Galvan is an Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University.
She is the author of The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine ­Channeling,
the Occult and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (­Cornell
University Press, 2010). Her past research has focused on long
­nineteenth-century media technologies, spiritualism, mesmerism, and
psychical research and on both Victorian and contemporary ideas of
the posthuman. Her current book project, After Romance: Alienated
Marriage and Modern Character Realism, argues that late Victorian
and early modernist stories of marriage reflect a changing aesthetic of
realism. She is also coeditor (with Elsie Michie) of the essay collection
Replotting Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Ohio
State University Press, 2018).
 List of Contributors xli
Anne Jamison is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Western S­ ydney
University, as well as a member of the university’s Writing and ­Society
Research Centre. She is a feminist literary critic with a research focus
on nineteenth-century Irish and, more recently, Australian women’s
writing. She completed her Ph.D. at Queen's University Belfast and
has since published broadly on Irish literature, including research on
Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, Alicia Lefanu, Kate O’Brien, James
Clarence Mangan and Anne Enright, as well as on the ­intersections
between law, literature and authorship in the Victorian period. She is
the author of E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross: ­Female ­Authorship
and Literary Collaboration (Cork University Press, 2016) and was
awarded the State Library of New South Wales’s Nancy ­Keesing
­Research Fellowship in 2016 for her work on colonial ­Australian
writer, Catherine Helen Spence.
Mary Clai Jones is an Assistant Professor of English at Chadron State
College. She received her doctorate from the University of Kentucky
in 2015. Her research interests focus on the intersections of gender,
material culture, and ­social geography. She is currently working on
a monograph, Women on the Move: Navigating Space in Victorian
Fiction. This study examines how heroines in mid to late Victo-
rian fiction access spaces normally off limits by refashioning objects
typically relegated to feminine culture. She explores how women’s
bodies shape and get shaped by their environments and how female
bodies move through Victorian textual spaces. She is particularly
interested in the works of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie
Collins, and Marie Corelli.
Céline Magot received her Ph.D. in literature from the University of
­Toulouse with a thesis on the representation of space in Elizabeth
Bowen’s novels. She was a research student at Birkbeck College
­(University of London) in 2002–2003 and a visiting scholar at the
University of Texas in Austin in 2013. She is currently an Assistant
Professor of ­English at the Université de Toulouse II Jean-Jaurès
(France). She works on gender, space and speed in literature as well as
the writings of the Second World War. She has published extensively
on Elizabeth Bowen both in journals like Textual Practice, ­Literary
London, ­Miranda, Études Britanniques Contemporaines, and
­Anglophonia and in edited collections like Regards sur l’intime en
Irlande (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2008). Her current research
also focuses on Anna Kavan and Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Lizzie Harris McCormick holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from
The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is an As-
sociate Professor of English at Suffolk County Community College,
where she also directs the Writing Center. Her work explores the
xlii List of Contributors
ways fictional, poetic, and biographical narratives of artistic creation
during the late-nineteenth century challenged turn-of-the-century
British psychological theories of the creative imagination and science’s
new paradigms for understanding creative processes. In particular, it
explores the ways lesser-known female authors engage with the super-
natural in order to interrogate era psychological theories. Her work
has been collected in The Fantastic of the Fin de Siecle (Cambridge
Scholars, 2016), as well as published in The Latchkey, Henry James
e-Journal, Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, and The Worcester
Review. For her current project Drawing Parallels, she is composing
a graphic work of scholarship on Jean Rhys (with Laurel Harris) and
an illustrated adaptation of Aino Kallas’s Wolf’s Bride.
Jean Mills is an Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of
­Criminal Justice, The City University of New York. She is the author
of ­Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Spirit of Modernist
Classicism (The Ohio State University Press, 2014). Her most recent
publications include “Placing Virginia Woolf” (2018) for Tate/St. Ives
­exhibit of all women artists, Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired
by Her ­Writings and “Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Class,” in
A ­Companion to Virginia Woolf (Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2016).
She has also published on Gertrude Stein and rap music, Virginia
Woolf and pacifism, and women’s literature of the 1920s and 1930s.
She is currently at work editing and introducing Jane Marcus’s unfin-
ished biography on Nancy Cunard, Perfect Stranger, and on her own
project, 1924: A Year in the Life of Virginia Woolf.
Donna Mitchell holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Limerick
and is a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in English at Mary Immac-
ulate College, University of Limerick. She is an active member and
Treasurer of the Sibéal Feminist and Gender Studies Network and
works as a book reviewer for the University of Stirling’s The Gothic
Imagination website. Her work has been published in journals such
as Otherness: Essays and Studies, Writing from Below and The
­Journal of Dracula Studies, and edited collections such as Images of
the ­Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic (Fairleigh ­Dickinson
University Press, 2013), Posthuman Gothic (University of Wales
Press, 2016), and a forthcoming Critical Companion to Tim Burton.
She is currently working on a monograph entitled The Gothic Doll
that examines female identity through the ­figure of the doll in classic
and contemporary Gothic narratives.
Jennifer Mitchell earned her Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, City Uni-
versity of New York. She is currently an Assistant Professor of En-
glish at Union College in Schenectady, New York. She is working on
a monograph about the critical intersection between sexology, mod-
ernism, and masochism. Her work in gender and sexuality studies has
 List of Contributors xliii
appeared in The Journal of Bisexuality, Bookbird, The ­Journal of the
Fantastic in the Arts, and The Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Her schol-
arship on Jean Rhys, James Joyce, and D.H. Lawrence has been pub-
lished in various edited collections and The D.H. Lawrence Review.
Finally, she is the coeditor, with Elwood Watson and Marc E ­ dward
Shaw, of HBO’s Girls and the Awkward Politics of Privilege, Gender,
and Race (Rowman and Littlefied, 2015).
Colleen Morrissey holds a Ph.D. in English from the Ohio State Univer-
sity. Her work on gender and the nineteenth-century novel is forth-
coming in Studies in the Novel, the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its
Reception, and Marie Corelli: Woman Writer Warrier. Along with
collaborator Robyn Warhol, she is a web editor and researcher for
the digital humanities project Reading Like a Victorian. She is also
a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Her story, “Good
Faith” won an O. Henry Prize, and her creative work has appeared in
the Alaska Quarterly Review, Southeast Review, Cincinnati Review,
and elsewhere.
Andrew Hock Soon Ng is an Associate Professor of Literature at Monash
University, Malaysia, where he teaches theories of authorship, postco-
lonial writing, postmodern fiction, and film genres. He holds a Ph.D.
in Literature from the University of Western Australia. The author of
various scholarly articles on the Gothic, Asian horror, and the liter-
ary aesthetics of the Bible, his latest book, published by Palgrave, is
Women and Domestic Space in Contemporary Gothic Fiction: The
House as Subject (2014).
Julia Panko is Assistant Professor of English at Weber State Univer-
sity in Utah. Previously, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in
the ­Humanities at MIT. She received her Ph.D. in English from the
University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work has appeared in
journals including the James Joyce Quarterly and Contemporary
Literature. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled
Out of Print: Mediating Information in the Novel and the Book,
which argues that the form of the print book, in its complex co-
evolution with media and information forms, has had a substantial
impact on the novel since modernism. Her second book project fo-
cuses on the intertwined histories of ghost fiction, sound media, and
spiritualism.
Scott Rogers is Professor of English at Weber State University, where
he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-­century literature and popular culture. He earned his
Ph.D. in ­English at Oklahoma State University. His work has ap-
peared in such journals as Studies in English Literature, Victorian
Literature and C­ ulture, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, The
Victorian, and The ­Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.
xliv List of Contributors
Kate Schnur is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English ­Language
and Literature and a certificate student in Science and ­Technology
Studies at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, The Trou-
ble with the Female Body: How Anglo-Modernism Interrupts
Medical Knowledge Production (1910–1938), studies the ways
­A nglo-modernist authors and their contemporaries in the medical sci-
ences shared an interest in the female body as an epistemological site.
She is also and adjunct lecturer in the English department at Queens
College/CUNY.
Rebecca Soares holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin–­
Madison. She is currently an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, The
Honors College at Arizona State University. Her current project,
­Immaterial Print: Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century T ­ ransatlantic
Literature, argues that the nineteenth-century popular practice of
­spiritualism provides a metaphor for transatlantic communication and
literary circulation. Rebecca’s article, “Literary Graftings: H ­ annah
Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative and the Nineteenth-­Century
Transatlantic Reader,” won the 2010 VanArsdel Prize given by the Re-
search Society for Victorian Periodicals and was published in Victorian
Periodicals Review. Her scholarship has appeared in Victorian Poetry
and is forthcoming in Women’s Writing.
Luke Thurston is director of the David Jones Centre at ­Aberystwyth
­University, United Kingdom. His publications include James Joyce and
the Problem of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge U ­ niversity Press, 2004),
­Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to ­Modernism ­(Routledge,
2012), and the Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (coed-
ited with Scott Brewster, 2017). He is currently translating Jean
Laplanche’s The Unfinished Copernican Revolution and writing a
monograph on war and crowds in May Sinclair, Wyndham Lewis,
and David Jones.
Section I

Heaps, Rubbish, Treasure,

Litter, Tatters
Fantastic Objects in Context
Jill Galvan

Perhaps nothing attests to the Victorians’ conviction in a rationally

intelligible world so much as the founding in 1882 of the Society for
Psychical Research (SPR), an organization devoted to the systematic in-
vestigation and theorizing of occult events. The fact that clairvoyance,
mesmerism, spiritualism, and the like were subjected to rigid empirical
protocols suggests that not even the most obscure of phenomena were
invulnerable to the obsessive science-making of the age. SPR researchers
of spiritualism for instance monitored the conditions of séance ghost
channeling in order to prevent misinterpretation or fraud. By the SPR’s
logic, belief in strange events required verification; verification in turn
required intense study of a perceivable environment.
And yet such a compulsion for certainty dispels the essential read-
erly response to the ghost tale: so at least thought late Victorian au-
thor ­Vernon Lee. Her preface to the short story collection Hauntings
(1890) is overt in its derogation of the modern treatment of the occult,
lauding the classic folk narrative over the latter-day account. Only
the former motivates “sensations” that are “terrible but delicious”—­
anxious but paradoxically enjoyable—in leaving events “enwrapped
in mystery” (37). Opposing herself to “the number of highly reasoning
men of semi-science” who seek to pin down ghosts, Lee declares that
her own stories will contain “no hauntings such as could be contrib-
uted by the Society for Psychical Research, … no spectres that can
be caught in definite places and made to dictate judicial evidence”
(38, 40). She writes dismissively of the interest of these “highly reason-
ing men” in the “experience of some Jemima Jackson, who fifty years
ago, being nine years of age, saw her maiden aunt appear six months
after ­decease”—snidely alluding, probably, to SPR members Edmund
­Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Frank Podmore’s then recently published
Phantasms of the Living (1886), a vast evidentiary compilation of first-
hand anecdotes from the Victorian public of purported encounters
with the distant or dying (38).
As the present volume turns to “Fantastic Objects,” I’d underscore one
notable aspect of Lee’s ghostly aesthetics: its implied orientation toward
2 Jill Galvan
materiality, as opposed to what she sees as the deficiencies of the SPR’s
own orientation. Describing her optimal supernatural tale, Lee is atten-
tive to things: to their unanswering, provocative effect upon us. For all
the contemporary reign of the empirical fact, she registers the objective
world’s ability not to prove anything but, just the opposite, to inspire a
frisson of unknowing:

’tis the mystery that touches us, the vague shroud of moonbeams that
hangs about the haunting lady, the glint on the warrior’s breastplate,
the click of his unseen spurs, while the figure itself wanders forth,
scarcely outlined, scarcely separated from the surrounding trees.
(37)

To experience a ghost is to register its minute physical details (the breast-

plate, the spurs, the milieu of trees) and their enigmatic invitation to
our senses. But there are things, and there are things: Lee disdains the
mundane physicality of the SPR ghost, who “stumble[s] and fumble[s]
about, with Jemima Jackson’s maiden aunt, among the arm-chairs and...
sofas of reality” (38–39). The ghosts that interest her, by contrast, are
half-invented by us: they fuse the world out there with the world within,
the objective and the subjective. They are

things of the imagination, born there, bred there, sprung from the
strange confused heaps, half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in our
fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vivid im-
pressions, litter of multi-coloured tatters, and faded herbs and flow-
ers, whence arises that odour (we all know it), musty and damp, but
penetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which hangs in the air
when the ghost has swept through the open door, and the flickering
flames of candle and fire start up once more after waning.
(39)

It is not just that the things of the world inspire impressions of haunting
but that these impressions take their form, oddly, from the furniture of
our own minds—heaps, rubbish, treasure, litter, tatters. Their vividness,
tactility, and pungent odorousness reinforce their mentalized sensuality.
Lee’s aestheticization of the apparition makes materiality and psychol-
ogy fluid, almost indistinguishable. By extension—as we see in her no-
vella “The Oke of Okehurst, or A Phantom Lover” (1890), as well as the
other authors’ tales of haunted portraits and portrait-making explored
in this section by Anne DeLong—it makes one specific thing, the art
object, an intriguing hybrid: not just object but also a more unfixable
subjective meaning. The tales DeLong analyzes depict the dynamic, ap-
paritionally uncertain relationship between the painting as object on the
one hand and the artist’s or viewer’s perceptions on the other. As such,
 Heaps, Rubbish, Treasure, Litter, Tatters 3
they may remind us of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and other contem-
poraries’ avant-garde resistance to notions of the strict objectivity or
referentiality of the artwork, together with their acknowledgment of an
illimitable diversity of responses to it. But as DeLong helps us to see, the
uncertainty of the artwork is also a matter of gender, comprising the un-
sayable or delegitimized experiences of women. Faced with the picture
of a woman who unsettles dominant social and sexual politics, each of
these stories’ male narrators responds with an act of interpretive framing
that stills the portrait’s disturbance, reaffirming patriarchal certainties.
That conflict between feminine forms of knowledge and male perspec-
tives is hinted as well in the detective tale analyzed by Julia Panko, Ag-
atha Christie’s “Wireless.” As a genre, detective fiction is premised, like
science, on masculine deduction; hence, we might expect Christie’s story
to side against the irrational and supernatural. But on the contrary, as
Panko shows, “Wireless” suggests the fallibility of male rationalist
­expertise—even in relation to something as technological as radio—
and, inversely, the revelatory power of female intuition. Here again, the
object world calls out elusive capacities of the mind and self.
Christie implies the overweening yet imperceptive claims of science
and technology, and Lee likewise offers her stories as correctives to the
insipid, crass materialism of the modern student of ghosts. On the other
hand, the divide between science and the supernatural was not always
so clear-cut. In other words, a critique like Lee’s belies the complicated
interfusion of matter and mystery, the physical and the psychical, ear-
nestly presumed and studied by Victorian theorists of the occult—
psychical researchers, even modern spiritualists. For example, the com-
mon phenomenon of séance materializations—walking, talking visi-
tants; apports, or magically appearing flowers and other objects; and
ectoplasm, a mystical substance flowing from the orifices of the medi-
um’s body—highlights the believed enchantment of the tangible as a me-
dium of spirituality. Additionally, the technology of spirit photography,
the capturing of ghostly images on film, was only one illustration of the
widespread principle among devotees that occult phenomena adhered
to discoverable “natural laws”—in this case, optical laws: the camera
was accorded a special sensitivity to ghostly presences. This principle
effectively spiritualized nature, making the physical world here continu-
ous with the next world there. Crucially, too, the SPR’s focus on nature
meant an attunement not just to the external sensory environment but
also to elusive mental properties as possible explanations for the percep-
tual and other mysteries under study. The SPR’s many theories about
the mind—its subconscious volitional, imaginative, and mnemonic
­capacities—actually dovetail with the psychological bent of Lee’s fiction.
Indeed, the Victorian empiricist occult modernizes our sense of won-
der in our material world in ways that may not at first be apparent. Inter-
estingly, the fantastic objects of Margery Lawrence’s twentieth-century
4 Jill Galvan
fiction that Melissa Edmundson surveys in her chapter are remarkably
reminiscent of psychometry, another nineteenth-century preternatural
techne. A clairvoyant sensitive, the psychometrist had the ability to know
an object’s extensive history, including the events in the lives of its former
owners, merely by holding it. Thus, the psychometric thing, like the titu-
lar “Haunted Saucepan” and other Gothic objects in Lawrence’s stories,
possessed a power to bring the buried past into the present. In both psy-
chometry and the haunted objects of Lawrence’s narratives, moreover,
lies an unexpected literalization of what Victorian scholars today call
thing theory. Our notion that the literary critic should pay attention to
the embedded record of the fictional thing—reading it, as Elaine Freed-
good elaborates, not just as metaphor or symbol but as metonym of an
intricate material and cultural storyworld—animates it, giving it a re-
sidual existence and making it inextricable from the lives it has touched.
Fantastic objects are not dead but vital, carrying their sometimes trou-
bled histories with them; as such, they merely exaggerate, in a sense, the
suggestive resonance of all fictional materiality.
Finally, on the question of the interconnections between the material
and the inscrutable—and centrally to The Female Fantastic as a whole—
is the embodiment of women themselves. Well into the twentieth cen-
tury, women remained a contradiction: hyperbolically materialized in
their tendency, traceable to their nerves, to neurasthenia or hysteria, as
well as in their sexual and reproductive essence—but also fundamentally
defiant of categorization and discomfortingly unknowable to male ratio-
nality. This is the horizon of mystery that beckoned the SPR, as usually
male scientists puzzled over usually female sensitives: the Creery sisters,
Leonora Piper, Eva C., Eusapia Palladino, and many more. It is also of
course the root of the figure of the femme fatale, one representation of
which we find in Daphne du Maurier’s “The Doll,” as Donna Mitchell
elaborates in the chapter that follows. Like the vampiric women of Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Mitchell aptly suggests, Du Maurier’s heroine
embodies a sexuality that is at once alluring, inviting the rapt male gaze,
and monstrous in its undefinable, uncanny excess. The male narrator’s
urge to erotically thing-ify this woman is horrifically frustrated by her
own bizarre assertion of lustful subjectivity, as he witnesses her having
sex with a doll. The unknowability of women is inseparable from the
bodily secrets of their nerves, their desirability, and their desire. Women
are, as many authors would have it, the most fantastic objects of all.

Works Cited
Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian
Novel. U of Chicago P, 2006.
Lee, Vernon. Hauntings, edited by Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham.
Broadview P, 2006.
1 Framing the Fin-de-Siècle
Female Narrative
Ghostly Portraits of the
Emerging New Woman
Anne DeLong

First named specifically in an 1894 essay by Sarah Grand, the “New

Woman” was described as morally strong and socially aware, “awaking
from [her] long apathy” to respond to the cries of “the desolate and the
oppressed” (270). In the same year, an essay by Ouida offered a critique
of this figure, characterizing her as both a ridiculous contradiction and
a dangerous threat to the fabric of conventional society, “with her fierce
vanity, her undigested knowledge, her over-weening estimate of her own
value and her fatal want of all sense of the ridiculous” (61). She is a
spectral figure, comprised of an indeterminate and often contradictory
assortment of conflicting definitions and assumptions about evolving
gender roles. At once a textual construction and a cultural phenomenon,
this identity provides an appellation for a conglomeration of characteris-
tics that threaten the existing social order, including sexual agency, intel-
lectual curiosity, political awareness, and gender fluidity. That the New
Woman—or often her historical avatars—frequently appears in Gothic
ghost stories of the 1890s is therefore not surprising, since the genre
itself represents reality as a shifting and imprecise paradigm. As Sally
Ledger argues, this figure is “central to an account of fin-de-siècle cul-
ture” precisely because of “her entanglement (whether as feminist activ-
ist, woman writer or textual construct) with such cultural phenomena of
the 1880s and 1890s as decadence, socialism, imperialism and emergent
homosexual identities” (4). Supernatural tales concern themselves with
many of the same elements, making them a suitable arena for interro-
gating the changing gender dynamics that the New Woman personifies.
This chapter analyzes three fin-de-siècle ghost stories by Victorian
women writers that employ a male narrative voice to enclose a woman’s
likeness and history. Each of these tales—Margaret Oliphant’s “The
Portrait” (1889), Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst; or, A Phantom Lover”
(1890), and Edith Nesbit’s “The Ebony Frame” (1893)—focuses on the
haunted likeness of a woman who defies her objectification into art and
inserts her own storytelling voice into the text. These female charac-
ters are framed not only as visual and literary works of art but also
in the sense that they are blamed for the shortcomings and failures
6 Anne DeLong
of interpretation of the male narrators. Furthermore, they challenge
patriarchal authority in their unspoken insistence on the importance of
matrilineage. As a transitional period of shifting social, gendered, and
economic paradigms, the 1890s bore witness to conflicted responses to
the challenges and opportunities that the New Woman represents. While
this construction is frequently portrayed as anti-maternal, the texts un-
der examination here equate this figure with a matriarchal challenge to
patriarchy by emphasizing female lineage. Each of these texts utilizes an
unreliable male narrator to present the story of a female subject, and this
narrative indeterminacy undermines the containment of her subversive
discourse. While these storytellers seek to define their pictured subjects
in patriarchal terms, their own hermeneutic failures open up spaces for
alternative interpretations.
While acknowledging this appellation as an imprecise paradigm,
Ledger notes that this designation is also retroactively applied to real
women: “in recent years the title of the New Woman has been rather
more loosely applied to proto-feminists in literature, and more partic-
ularly to women writers” (1). Women writers are drawn to the ghost
story genre in particular for reasons that have been enumerated by var-
ious critics. Vanessa D. Dickerson argues that women in the nineteenth
century felt some affinity with the figure of the ghost:

Further and further removed from the power-wielding occupations

of the world—law, science, medicine, even the formal administra-
tion of religion—yet relegated to the higher realm of moral influ-
ence, the position of the nineteenth-century female, as influential as
it was, was yet equivocal, ambiguous, marginal, ghostly.
(5)

Like the haunting specters of Gothic tales, Victorian wives, mothers,

and daughters were frequently confined to their homes, trapped in a
domesticity that was often more hellish than heavenly.
Women writers of the period often represent this containment via
Gothic tropes of imprisonment and entrapment. But supernatural fiction
also offers a discursive space in which to contest this confinement. As
Melissa Edmundson observes:

Recognizing that direct political or social critique would potentially

alienate their reading audiences, these authors sought more sub-
versive means to discuss current issues. Like the ghosts and spirits
which haunt their pages, women writers of ghost stories “troubled”
the present by raising awareness of unsafe domestic spaces, gender
relations, economic conditions and the consequences of imperialism.
(5)
 Framing the Fin-de-Siècle Female Narrative 7
The tales under analysis here utilize the domestic trope of marriage to
explore larger sociopolitical dynamics. As critic Jennifer Uglow notes,
“the popular origins of ghost stories, their alliance to oral tradition,
gave educated women one way of criticizing and undermining the
structures which constrained their lives” (Dalby xi). In their respective
tales, Oliphant, Lee, and Nesbit each expose cultural anxieties about the
emerging threat of the New Woman through their narrators’ attempts to
control these stories. Like Ouida, the male storytellers portray the New
Woman as flawed, narcissistic, or corrupt. But the authors who create
these unreliable narrators depict the New Woman influence more posi-
tively. Like Grand’s, their conception of this emerging figure emphasizes
her social and intellectual awareness.
In her analysis of Gothicism in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion
(1981), Rosemary Jackson cautions against ascribing simplistic political
intent to supernatural texts, due to their dialogic nature. Jackson high-
lights structural indeterminacy as one of the genre’s features, examining
texts with complicated narrative frameworks in which “a juxtaposition
of apparently objective and subjective accounts does not place authority
with either of them: it undermines both” (Jackson 103, 106). My exam-
ination of these three Gothic tales that utilize layered perspectives sug-
gests that narratorial unreliability can in fact also subvert the dominant
discourse. As Emma Liggins notes, “in the fin-de-siècle woman’s ghost
story, the spectral encounter [is] often harnessed to gender indetermi-
nacy,” like the New Woman herself (38). Such uncertainties reinforce the
shifting nature of these tales, disrupting the dominant discourse of both
the text and of the culture. Liggins also argues that transgressive female
influences are ultimately expunged from Victorian ghost stories:

the spectral encounter […] can function as the longed-for erotic mo-
ment which makes amends for the sterility and boredom of marriage/
social convention, or it can be represented in terms of a nightmare
of female sexual dominance […] Both forms of unworldly female
eroticism must ultimately be exorcised from the text in an attempt
to restore stability and banish a dangerous fluid spectrality, which
threatens acceptable gender boundaries.
(38)

However, in the stories examined here, the cultural threat that the New
Woman represents is not exorcised but framed, contained but neverthe-
less displayed. Although misrepresented by patriarchal voices, these New
Women present themselves as socially conscious, sexually transgressive,
and intellectually ambitious. Their portraits function as speaking like-
nesses, representations so lifelike that they look as if they could provide
utterance. Despite or perhaps because of the structural and gendered
8 Anne DeLong
indeterminacy of these tales, these women’s stories emerge from both
their pictorial and narrative strictures to provide social critiques con-
cerning conventional social and economic systems, including marriage
and capitalism.

The Return of the Mother in Margaret Oliphant’s

“The Portrait”
Margaret Oliphant’s tale “The Portrait” employs a male narrator to
enclose a woman’s story. Phil Canning and his elderly father inhabit a
home that is curiously devoid of any feminine presence. As Phil narrates,
“My mother had died at my birth, or shortly after, and I had grown up in
the gravity and silence of a house without women” (90). When a paint-
ing of Phil’s dead mother arrives, it exerts a mysterious influence over the
narrator, compelling him to confront his father about his lack of char-
ity toward his dead wife’s relatives. This familial rift is mended when
they take in a young cousin whom Phil eventually marries, reinstalling a
female sensibility in the home.
The first female figure that inserts itself into the story is a poor woman
with a sleeping baby who accosts the narrator. Her initial appearance is
ghostly: “the woman’s figure was like a shadow, flitting about, now here,
now there, on one side or another of the gate” (101). This woman reveals
herself to Phil as one of his father’s tenants, whose goods have been
confiscated because she failed to pay her rent. She contrasts her debased
state with his class privilege:

Oh, gentleman, it is easy for the likes of you, that, if you ain’t com-
fortable in one room, can just walk into another; but if one room is
all you have, and every bit of furniture you have taken out of it, and
nothing but the four walls left.
(102)

Motivated by a kind of socialist sympathy, Phil confronts his father with

outraged idealism. During the quarrel that ensues, the father remarks,
“You’ve become a little like your mother, Phil,” suggesting she similarly
held political and social views that differed from her husband’s (107).
In this respect, Phil’s departed mother manifests a proto-New Woman
sensibility, since this construct was often linked to socialist views, polit-
ical and social awareness, and championship of the oppressed.
Shortly thereafter the father unveils the newly arrived painting of his
deceased girl bride captured forever, in death and in art, at 20 years of
age. Her 30-year-old son experiences the portrait as a speaking likeness,
one that appears animate: “The soft features seemed to melt, the lips to
move, the anxiety in the eyes to become a personal inquiry” (113). He
immediately questions his own interpretation, correcting himself with
 Framing the Fin-de-Siècle Female Narrative 9
“Ah, no! nothing of the kind; only because of the water in mine” (113).
They hang the mother’s portrait in the drawing room, a sealed-off fem-
inine space, untouched since the mother’s death thirty years before. As
Phil relates, “The picture was full-length, and we had hung it low, so
that she might have been stepping into the room” (121). The room is so
forbidden and the portrait so overwhelming that the narrator must fur-
ther distance himself by framing her again through the window:

I went outside, as I had so often done when I was a child, and looked
through the windows into the still and now sacred place, which had
always impressed me with a certain awe. Looked at so, the slight
figure in its white dress seemed to be stepping down into the room
from some slight visionary altitude, looking with that which had
seemed to me at first anxiety, which I sometimes represented to
myself now as a wistful curiosity, as if she were looking for the life
which might have been hers.
(138–39)

Once again, he revises his interpretation of the painting’s expression, re-

placing her maternal concern with youthful restlessness. In this way, the
mother’s speaking likeness communicates conflicting messages about
domestic contentment and domestic confinement.
Although Oliphant’s portrait does not come to life as in other Gothic
tales, it nevertheless exerts a haunting influence upon the living. After its
arrival, on three separate occasions, Phil experiences inexplicable panic
attacks, in which “[his] heart leaped up and began beating wildly in [his]
throat, in [his] ears, as if [his] whole being had received a sudden and
intolerable shock” (131). These moments of panic draw him not to his
mother’s drawing room as he first assumes they will, but to his father’s
library. Each time, he interrupts his father reading some mysterious let-
ters which his father then quickly hides. And, each time, he is unable
to communicate the reasons for his agitation to his father. Gripped by
hysteria, he can only cry, “I don’t know what is the matter” (134). His
subsequent attempts to explain are equally cryptic, but seem to point to
the mother’s influence:

I am not here by my own will. Something that is stronger than I has

brought me. There is something in your mind which disturbs—others
[…] Some one—who can speak to you only by me—speaks to you by
me; and I know that you understand.
(145–46)

His father attempts to pacify him by allowing the young man to look
“into that matter about the poor tenants,” but Phil objects, “that is not
what it is” (147). The father assumes that his son is still upset about the
10 Anne DeLong
treatment of the tenants, and calls in several doctors, who treat the young
man’s budding socialism as a pathology. Throughout this short story,
Phil argues with his father about the latter’s inhumane treatment of poor
tenants on his estate, a subplot which remains curiously unresolved.
The contents of the black-bordered letters are eventually revealed
to be communication with the mother’s family. The portrait had been
kept for decades by her cousin, apparently a rival for her affections, and
the letters are a plea for Phil’s father to take in the daughter the cousin
has left upon his death. The father resists this matrilineal claim, just
as he persists in “sever[ing Phil] entirely from her side of the house,”
referring to both the forbidden drawing room and her living relatives
(108). When the cousin’s daughter arrives to plead her case in person,
she is a dead ringer for Phil’s mother and even bears her name: Agnes.
She also bears

the look of a common race, more subtle than mere resemblance

[to] the Agnes to whom age can never come, she who they say was
the mother of a man who never saw her,—it was she who led her
kinswoman, her representative, into our hearts.
(161)

They marry, and the second “Agnes [has] her peaceful domestic throne
established under the picture” (163). In this way, the maternal influence
is reintegrated and safely contained, reframed in the domestic setting of
the drawing room. No further mention is made of Phil’s interfering with
his father’s draconian management system, and all whispers of socialist
sensibilities are silenced in domestic bliss.
As Basham notes in her analysis of Oliphant’s emerging feminism
in her later works, “masculine narrators … embody her newly defined
sense of exclusion and injustice, as they dramatize too a masculine
inability to comprehend and include a female point of view” (172). While
Phil succeeds in reinstalling a feminine presence in the household, he ul-
timately fails to understand or act upon the more subversive matrilineal
influence of the mother’s New Woman socialist politics. Oliphant’s tale
thus displays the emerging New Woman as a compassionate critic of
greedy capitalism whose political awareness is subsumed by her roles as
wife and mother. Phil’s inability to defy his father by championing his
mother’s sensibilities places limits on the potential of the New Woman
as an agent for social change in Oliphant’s fiction.

Gender Bending and the Defiance of Objectification in

Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst; or, A Phantom Lover”
Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst; or, A Phantom Lover” begins with the
type of outer frame that is characteristic of many ghost stories, one that
 Framing the Fin-de-Siècle Female Narrative 11
establishes storyteller, audience, and setting. Lee prefaces her story with
a dedicatory letter to a friend, Russian poet Count Peter Boutourline,
reminding him that he has heard a version of this tale from her own lips
and describing her hesitation to fix it into print:

You thought it a fantastic tale, you lover of fantastic things, and

urged me to write it out at once, although I protested that, in such
matters, to write is to exorcise, to dispel the charm; and that print-
ers’ ink chases away the ghosts that may pleasantly haunt us, as
efficaciously as gallons of holy water.
(105)

Presumably, then, the tale was originally told by Lee herself to Boutour-
line, and her decision to create a male narrator for the print version is a
consciously stylistic one.
Lee begins with a brief monologue in which she establishes her nar-
rator as a painter, motivated to tell the tale in answer to a visitor to
his studio who has inquired about a particular drawing of a woman in
masculine attire: “That sketch up there with the boy’s cap?” (105). The
narrator cryptically alludes to a salacious scandal involving the pictured
woman:

I would frame it and hang it up, only people would ask questions.
Yes; you have guessed quite right—it is Mrs. Oke of Okehurst […] I
suppose the newspapers were full of it at the time. You didn’t know
that it all took place under my eyes?
(106–7)

He proceeds to relate the story of a murder/suicide motivated by a hus-

band’s jealousy over his wife’s ghostly lover. The dubious nature of the
narrator’s version of events is foreshadowed by the fact that before he
begins, he must turn the face of the murdered wife to the wall, a possible
sign that he is about to misrepresent her.
Indeed, one of the narrator’s primary failures is that he never succeeds
in painting the elusive Mrs. Oke. He repeatedly blames this failure on
the subject herself, describing her variously and vaguely as “exquisite
and strange,—an exotic creature,” “mysterious,” and even “perverse
and dangerous” (115, 116, 128). Although the commissioned work of
Alice Oke never materializes beyond pencil sketches, there are several
portraits which do figure prominently in Lee’s story. The most signif-
icant of these is a likeness of the first Alice Oke, ancestor of both the
present Alice Oke and her husband William, themselves first cousins.
Paintings of the first Alice and of her husband Nicholas are “hung in
a rather dark corner,” with Alice’s image securely claimed as patriar-
chal property: “in the corner of the woman’s portrait were the words,
12 Anne DeLong
‘Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil Pomfret, Esq., and wife to Nicholas Oke
of Okehurst,’ and the date 1626” (118). Her namesake, the present
Mrs. Alice Oke, is obsessed with her ancestress, whom she strongly re-
sembles, and with this past version’s scandalous history involving adul-
tery and murder. The narrator describes her as “a reincarnation of a
woman who murdered her lover two centuries and a half ago” (142).
Whether as a rebirth or a spirit possession, it is through the second Alice
that the first Alice appears to come alive and tell her story:

She seemed to know every word that Alice had spoken, every idea
that had crossed her mind. It sometimes struck me as if she were
telling me, speaking of herself in the third person, of her own
feelings—as if I were listening to a woman’s confidences, the recital
of her doubts, scruples, and agonies about a living lover.
(131)

William Oke does not share his wife’s obsession with the family scandal,
preferring that it remain untold. The first Alice’s embedded narrative is
revealed gradually, first by William Oke, who tells it “about as badly
and hesitatingly as was possible for mortal man” (120). As the narrator
paraphrases, “A certain Christopher Lovelock, a young gallant and poet
[…] had struck up a great friendship with his neighbours of Okehurst—
too great a friendship, apparently, with the wife, either for her husband’s
taste or her own” (121). The luckless Lovelock is subsequently “at-
tacked and murdered, ostensibly by highwaymen, but as was afterwards
rumoured, by Nicholas Oke, accompanied by his wife dressed as a
groom” (121). This interpolated history is later developed more fully by
the second Alice, who relates that it was the first Alice, disguised as a
groom, who actually murdered her lover:

Lovelock had completely disarmed [Oke], and got his sword at Oke’s
throat, crying out to him that if he would ask forgiveness he should
be spared for the sake of their old friendship, when the groom sud-
denly rode up from behind and shot Lovelock in the back.
(134)

It is unclear whether her motivation is to save her husband or to save

herself from the taint of the poet’s inferior class status. As the second
Alice speculates,

Alice Oke was very proud, I am sure. She may have loved the poet
very much, and yet been indignant with him, hated having to love
him. She may have felt that she had a right to rid herself of him, and
to call upon her husband to help her to do so.
(124)
 Framing the Fin-de-Siècle Female Narrative 13
The present Mrs. Oke nevertheless cherishes an obsession with the mur-
dered Lovelock, whose ghost seems to haunt the yellow drawing room
where she spends most of her days. Sealed from her husband’s disapprov-
ing eyes are both a framed miniature portrait of Lovelock, in “a small
black carved frame, with a silk curtain drawn over it” and Lovelock’s
poems, more embedded narratives, secreted in “an old Italian ebony in-
laid cabinet [behind] a complicated arrangement of double locks and false
drawers” (128, 126). The presence of so many told and untold stories en-
folded within one another results in the sort of structural indeterminacy
that Jackson cites as a hallmark of the Gothic. Here the structure un-
dermines the narrator’s interpretation of the motivations of both Alices.
While the first Alice usurps her husband’s prerogative to directly and in-
dependently avenge his cuckolding, the second Alice defies her husband’s
desires in a subtler way, through her infatuation with a phantom lover.
William Oke’s suspicion of and possessiveness over Agnes eventu-
ally overcome him. As Athena Vrettos notes, “ultimately, Alice’s erotic
obsession with the past is matched by her husband’s equally powerful
dread of reliving it, a dread that slowly drives him insane” (210). Mis-
takenly convinced that she is meeting a secret lover, Oke fires at a ghost
and kills his wife instead. But the violence of the original incident is
displaced, aimed not at the interloping lover but rather at the threat of
the New Woman herself.
Significantly, Lee’s narrator commits repeated failures of interpreta-
tion, misrepresenting events and misplacing both sympathy and blame.
Even more curiously, most critics seem to believe him. Yet the narrator is
repeatedly, explicitly proven wrong; just about every assumption that he
makes is clearly debunked. On his arrival at Okehurst he expects to find
“a totally uninteresting Kentish squire” with “at least five children” and
a wife who is a “bouncing, well-informed, model house-keeper, elec-
tioneering, charity-organising young lady” (109). He is erroneous on all
counts. The house itself is “not what [he] had expected [,…] not at all
what I had pictured to myself the home of Mr. Oke of Okehurst” (110).
The narrator mistakes even the story’s genre, believing himself to be in
a fairy tale, “being led through the palace of the Sleeping Beauty,” when
he is in fact entering a Gothic nightmare, a house haunted by obsession
and madness (111). But his most disturbing failure of interpretation is
the blame that he lays upon Alice Oke, framing her for her own murder.
Lee’s narrator describes William Oke in glowing terms:

He was, I found, extremely good,—the type of the perfectly consci-

entious young Englishman, the sort of man who ought to have been
the Christian soldier kind of thing; devout, pure-minded, brave,
incapable of any baseness, a little intellectually dense, and puzzled
by all manner of moral scruples.
(117)
14 Anne DeLong
The narrator attributes Oke’s neuroses to his wife’s indifference:

this monotonous life of solitude, by the side of a woman who took

no more heed of him than of a table or chair, was producing a vague
depression and irritation in this young man, so evidently cut out for
a cheerful, commonplace life.
(117)

On the other hand, the narrator reads Mrs. Oke as “a mad-woman”

who “positively frightened” him, and ultimately victim-blames her for
her husband’s violence (135).
Several critics seem to agree with Lee’s narrator, indicting the couple’s
unhealthy relationship, and, by implication, Alice herself. Vrettos has
cited failures in the marital relationship, noting that “the memory of
[Lovelock’s murder] profoundly divides the living Alice Oke from her
husband, preoccupying the thoughts, actions, and desires of the former,
while haunting the latter with an equally obsessive sense of terror, jeal-
ousy, and shame” (208). Adeline R. Tintner concurs with this reading:

Vernon Lee implies through the painter’s intelligence in Oke of Oke-

hurst that Alice Oke’s torturing of her husband by inventing a lover
from the history of their house and his being an easy victim based
on his neurotic jealousy are due to their bored and occupationless
country-house living.
(360)

And Diana Basham succinctly concludes that Alice Oke drives her “thor-
oughly nice and very English husband insane” (174). But I argue that
Alice is framed by a faulty, patriarchal narrative that fails to interpret
the signs of the husband’s psychotic tendencies and justifies the narra-
tor’s actions and inactions.
Lee’s narrator continually encourages Alice’s obsession with the Love-
lock scandal, revealing what appears to be a growing obsession of his
own:

So I let myself go to the habit of allowing Mrs. Oke daily to talk over
her strange craze, or rather of drawing her out about it. I confess
that I derived a morbid and exquisite pleasure in doing so: it was so
characteristic in her, so appropriate to the house! It completed her
personality so perfectly, and made it so much easier to conceive a
way of painting her.
(128–29)

He purges his own complicity in subsequent events several times, includ-

ing this very telling retrospective narratorial justification:
 Framing the Fin-de-Siècle Female Narrative 15
Perhaps it was wrong of me to do so; and I have often reproached
myself very seriously later on. But after all, how was I to guess that
I was making mischief merely by chiming in, for the sake of the
portrait I had undertaken, and of a very harmless psychological ma-
nia, with what was merely the fad, the little romantic affectation or
eccentricity, of a scatter-brained and eccentric young woman? How
in the world should I have dreamed that I was handling explosive
substances? A man is surely not responsible if the people with whom
he is forced to deal, and whom he deals with as with all the rest of
the world, are quite different from all other human creatures.
(122)

The narrator thus justifies his own complicity in further exacerbating

the tensions in the Oke marriage. He also excuses his own interpre-
tive failures when he rhetorically asks, “How should I know that the
wretched husband would take such matters seriously?” (143).
The answer to this question lies in his own observations. The narrator
initially notes a peculiar facial feature upon first meeting William Oke:
“I noticed—the only interesting thing about him—a very odd nervous
frown between his eyebrows, a perfect double gash,—a thing which usu-
ally means something abnormal: a mad-doctor of my acquaintance calls
it the maniac-frown” (108). Although the “mad-doctor” quoted makes
use of the pseudoscientific system of physiognomy, the story’s events
confirm Oke’s psychological abnormalities, and this feature functions as
a visible emblem of his madness. When his wife alludes to the unpleasant
family history later, “the double gash paint[s] itself scarlet between his
eyebrows” (135). Oke even confesses his struggles with insanity to the
narrator: “I feel sometimes as if I were mad, and just fit to be locked up.
But don’t think I don’t struggle against it. I do” (150). As his lunacy in-
tensifies, the maniac frown has “grown a permanent feature of his face”
(140). Yet the narrator refuses to paint it, just as he refuses to blame Oke
for the violent murder:

It was with this expression of face that I should have liked to paint
him; but I felt that he would not have liked it, that it was more fair
to him to represent him in his mere wholesome pink and white and
blond conventionality.
(117)

By obscuring Oke’s maniacal tendencies, the artist is complicit not only

in his crime but also in its justification.
Both Alice Okes transgress the boundaries of acceptable behavior
for women of their respective periods. Like her cross-dressing ancestor,
Alice shocks the narrator and other guests by appearing in masculine
attire. She mixes gender categories by sporting a “mannish little coat and
16 Anne DeLong
hat, driving a powerful young horse with the utmost skill, and chattering
like a school-girl of sixteen” (133). Liggins characterizes her as “the bored
New Woman, whose eagerness to commune with the spectral, like her
gender ambiguity, threatens the patriarchal order of things” (43). Lizzie
Harris McCormick argues that Alice uses her imaginative power “to
symbolically ‘unman’ both male characters. The painter’s creative pow-
ers dwindle in her presence, leaving him artistically impotent to do more
than sketch,” and that “the balance of pathology and power has shifted
in the Oke marriage” (170). The structural indeterminacy of Lee’s story
allows Alice’s narrative to undermine late nineteenth-century masculine
discourses about hysteria, pathology, and marital relationships.
Alice also subverts patriarchy in her reverence for a female ancestor,
an emphasis on matrilineage that her patriarchal husband would seek
to deny. William and Alice Oke are both descended not only from the
Okes but also from the Pomfrets, a maternal influence that embarrasses
William:

“It was the first time an Oke married a Pomfret,” my host informed
me, “and the last time. The Pomfrets were quite different sort of
people—restless, self-seeking; one of them had been a favourite of
Henry VIII.” It was clear that William Oke had no feeling of having
any Pomfret blood in his veins; he spoke of these people with an
evident family dislike—the dislike of an Oke, one of the old, hon-
ourable, modest stock, which had quietly done its duty, for a family
of fortune-seekers and Court minions.
(121)

But Alice celebrates this adventurous, ambitious lineage and the female
ancestress who defied gender roles not only by cross-dressing but also
by usurping her husband’s prerogative in eliminating her lover and
preserving the family dignity. As in Oliphant’s tale, it is the return of
the repressed mother that haunts Lee’s pages, escaping the patriarchal
boundaries that seek to contain her.

Burning the Witch in Edith Nesbit’s “The Ebony Frame”

Edith Nesbit’s “The Ebony Frame” relates a man’s infatuation with the
painting of a witch who comes alive and seduces him into making a
Faustian bargain, offering herself in exchange for his soul. This story
features a male narrator who reveals himself to be both biased and clue-
less through his failures of interpretation and narrative justifications. He
becomes increasingly obsessed with the dead witch, preferring her to his
living fiancée. Ultimately the haunted portrait is destroyed by a fire that
purges the threat this woman poses to the narrator’s more conventional
marriage option.
 Framing the Fin-de-Siècle Female Narrative 17
In the opening paragraph the narrator reveals his own lack of sub-
stance in matters of sentimentality. Having recently come into a large
inheritance due to the death of an aunt, he quickly disregards any
loyalty to his former commitments, including his preexisting love inter-
est: “Even Mildred Mayhew, whom I had hitherto regarded as my life’s
light, became less luminous” (2). The narrator’s smug attitude illustrates
his male privilege:

She was a dear, good girl, and I meant to marry her some day. It
is very nice to feel that a good little woman is thinking of you—it
helps you in your work—and it is pleasant to know she will say ‘Yes,’
when you say, ‘Will you?’.
(2)

His fickle nature is also demonstrated by his lack of reverence for his
recently departed female relative: “Before the gloss was off my new
mourning, I was seated in my aunt’s armchair in front of the fire in the
drawing-room of my own house” (2). It is from this perspective that
he first notices the “ebony frame,” “beautifully and curiously carved,”
but enclosing “an exceedingly bad print” (3). This incongruous contrast,
supplemented by a conversation with his aunt’s housemaid, leads him to
the attic, to seek the original contents of the titular object.
The ebony frame does not yield its embedded secrets easily, for the
narrator must ascertain that the blackened panel actually houses “two
pictures, they had been nailed face to face” (4). One of these is a “speak-
ing likeness” of the narrator himself, so called not only because of its
resemblance but also because of its expressiveness: “Myself, a perfect
portrait, no shade of expression or turn of feature wanting” (6, 5). The
second likeness is of a beautiful woman in “a black velvet gown,” whose
“eyes met those of the spectator bewilderingly” (5). The narrator is
bewitched by this image: “I have never seen any other eyes like hers; they
appealed, as a child’s or a dog’s do; they commanded, as might those of
an empress” (5). Restoring her to the ebony frame, he develops an obses-
sion with the woman’s portrait that is partly narcissistic:

lying back in a pleasant languor, I idly raised my eyes to the picture

of the woman. I met her dark, deep, hazel eyes, and once more my
gaze was held fixed as by strong magic, the kind of fascination that
keeps one sometimes staring for whole minutes into one’s own eyes
in the glass.
(6–7)

In a dreamlike moment, the woman comes to life and tells her story, a
tale of love, witchcraft, and death. Although her history is mediated by
the narrator, it nonetheless reveals secrets that both titillate and frighten
18 Anne DeLong
him. She greets him as if in reunion, and he experiences “a sense of
having recovered life’s one great good” (8). She mistakes him for the
subject of the portrait whom he resembles, presumably his ancestor. She
identifies herself not only as his former lover, but also as a “ghost” and
a “witch”:

We loved each other, ah! no, you have not forgotten that, and when
you came back from the wars, we were to be married. Our pictures
were painted before you went away. You know I was more learned
than women of that day. Dear one, when you were gone, they said
I was a witch. They tried me. They said I should be burned. Just
because I had looked at the stars and gained more knowledge than
other women, they must needs bind me to a stake and let me be
eaten by the fire. And you far away!
(10)

Although this accused sorceress hails from a much earlier time, she
bears some affinity with the late nineteenth-century New Woman in
that her intellectual curiosity and knowledge of astronomy are perceived
as threats to the social order. Without the protection of her fiancé, she is
at the mercy of a society that represses female learning and agency. The
witch’s tale is one of patriarchal oppression, not only by the society that
condemns her to death but also by the devil himself. She relates that she
made a demonic pact on the night before her execution. She “sold [her]
soul to eternal flame” for “the right to come back through [her] picture
(if anyone, looking at it, wished for [her]), as long as [her] picture stayed
in its ebony frame” (11). She offers the narrator a similar Satanic deal:
“If you will also give up your hopes of heaven, I can remain a woman, I
can remain in your world! I can be your wife” (11–12). This embedded
tale affirms and promotes not only witchcraft but also female sexual
agency. In offering this bargain, the witch assumes the masculine role of
proposing marriage. This gender role reversal is at least as threatening to
the social order as the loss of the narrator’s soul.
The narrator is quick to pledge this vow, equivocating through such
phrases as “if I sacrifice my soul I win you? Why, love, it’s a contradic-
tion in terms. You are my soul” and “I will not […] give up my hope of
heaven on any terms. Tell me what I must do that you and I may make
our heaven here, as now?” (12). He continually justifies his rash choices,
emphasizing the liminal nature of the exchange. He wonders, “If it was
a dream, why have I never dreamed it again?” (10). The confusion be-
tween reality and fantasy contributes to the indeterminacy of the text as
the two states become interchangeable: “Not a thought of Mildred; all
other things in my life were a dream, this, its one splendid reality” (9).
When a tragic fire threatens his beloved portrait, his desperate
attempts to save it are curiously disconnected from his sense of its subject
 Framing the Fin-de-Siècle Female Narrative 19
as a person, rather than an object: “Strange to say, I only felt that the
picture was a thing we should like to look on through the long, glad,
wedded life that was to be ours. I never thought of it as being one with
her” (16). In distancing himself from the magical properties of the eb-
ony frame, he mitigates his own complicity in the deal to which he has
agreed. Although he succeeds in saving Mildred from the fire, he fails to
save either the painting or the fantasy woman who inhabits it.
Throughout the story, the narrator draws sharp contrasts between
his dream woman and the real one, Mildred, whom he finally mar-
ries. The sophisticated, old-fashioned woman of the portrait, with her
“straight nose, low brows, full lips, thin hands, large, deep, luminous
eyes” is esteemed far above Mildred’s “chocolate-box barmaid style of
prettiness” (5, 14). These differences mirror his changed social position
pre- and post-inheritance. While the dream woman is the aristocratic
lover of one of his illustrious ancestors, Mildred is the daughter of his
landlady, to whom he was beholden before his surprise inheritance.
While the excitingly risky reunion with the woman from the painting
seems heavenly, marriage to the commonplace Mildred seems a hellish
nightmare. As Liggins argues, “significantly, Nesbit paints the ghostly
encounter here as the truer form of fulfillment, with middle-class mar-
riage as the locus of horror” (46). Recoiling from “a horrible sense of
the reality of Mildred,” the narrator prefers the illusion of the witch
(Nesbit 151).
In this way the portrait becomes a projection of his unrealized fanta-
sies. To expunge these unattainable desires, he must metaphorically burn
the witch again, framing her for his own lust. Even the conflagration itself
is then blamed on another potential New Woman, the “nightly-studious
housemaid” (17). Like the “witch” whose astronomical expertise makes
her suspect in the seventeenth century, this nineteenth-century domestic
servant presumes to elevate her station through reading, a dangerous act
that threatens the stability of gender and class social structures.
Although the narrator’s exact relationship with the subject of the other
portrait is unclear, the woman believes him to be a reincarnation of her
lover, as she says, “you married another woman; but some day I knew
you would walk the world again, and that I should find you” (11). The
presence of the painting in the narrator’s family home and his physical
resemblance to the subject suggest that he is a relative, perhaps a descen-
dent, of the man in seventeenth-century dress. But the witch also relates
that the enchanted portrait initially resided with her mother, who first
invoked its magic. Retreating in fear from the ghost she conjured, the
mother hid the pictures away in their ebony frame. In several respects,
then, the embedded portraits and the stories they contain represent a
matrilineal influence, the narrator’s ancestor’s former lover’s attempt to
reinsert herself and her story into the patriarchal line. While the obvi-
ous crime for which the woman in the portrait is indicted appears to be
20 Anne DeLong
witchcraft, her more serious violations involve provoking, or embody-
ing, the narrator’s dissatisfaction with conventionality.
While each of these male narrators attempts to frame his female subject
in accordance with Ouida’s critique of the New Woman as anti-maternal,
anti-marriage, and anti-male, their embedded stories nevertheless emerge
to bolster Grand’s original conception of this paradigm as more paragon
than pariah. The narrator of Oliphant’s “The Portrait,” Phil Canning,
succumbs to the hysteria engendered by the portrait’s motherly and
socialist influences, a juxtaposition that destabilizes cultural critiques of
the New Woman as anti-maternal, but fails to engage fully with her rad-
ical politics. In Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst,” the narrator as frustrated art-
ist cannot contain the emergent New Woman, whose dangerous sexual
and gendered transgressions undercut and destabilize traditional mari-
tal dynamics. And in Nesbit’s “The Ebony Frame,” the lustful narrator
displaces his own dark desires onto the speaking likeness of a witch.
Although her execution by fire exorcises her demonic energies, his in-
ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy incarnates a potential
New Woman who is intellectually curious and sexually aggressive. The
failed attempts of these patriarchal discourses to frame—that is, display,
contain, or blame—the New Woman serve to instead open a space from
which she communicates as a speaking likeness, a reflection and an artic-
ulation of disruptive and progressive power.

Works Cited
Basham, Diana. The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in
Victorian Literature and Society. Macmillan, 1992.
Dalby, Richard, ed. Victorian Ghost Stories by Eminent Women Writers.
Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1988.
Dickerson, Vanessa D. Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and
the Supernatural. U of Missouri P, 1996.
Edmundson, Melissa. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
U of Wales P, 2013.
Grand, Sarah. “The New Aspect of the Woman Question.” The North American
Review, vol. 158, no. 448, 1894, p. 270.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Routledge, 1981.
Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle.
Manchester UP, 1997.
Lee, Vernon. Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, edited by Catherine Maxwell
and Patricia Pulham, Broadview Press, 2006.
Liggins, Emma. “Gendering the Spectral Encounter at the Fin De Siècle: Un-
speakability in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Stories.” Gothic Studies, vol. 15,
no. 2, 2013, pp. 37–52.
McCormick, Lizzie Harris. “Daydream Believers: Female Imagination in
Women’s Fin-de Siècle Fantastic Fiction.” The Fantastic of the Fin-de-Siècle,
edited by Irena Grubica and Zdenĕk Beran, Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2016.
 Framing the Fin-de-Siècle Female Narrative 21
Nesbit, Edith. Grim Tales. Kindle ed., A. D. Innes & Co., 1893.
Oliphant, Margaret. The Open Door, and the Portrait. Two Stories of the Seen
and the Unseen. Roberts Brothers, 1885.
Ouida, “The New Woman (1894).” The North American Review, vol. 272,
no. 3, 1987, p. 61.
Tintner, Adeline R. “Vernon Lee’s Oke of Okehurst; or the Phantom Lover
and James’s the Way It Came.” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 28, 1991,
pp. 355–362.
Vrettos, Athena. “‘In the Clothes of Dead People’: Vernon Lee and Ancestral
Memory.” Victorian Studies, vol. 55, no. 2, 2013, p. 202.
2 Monstrous Femininity and
Objectified Masculinity in
Daphne du Maurier’s
“The Doll”
Donna Mitchell

“The Doll” by Daphne du Maurier has a fragmented heritage. Written in

1927 when the author was just 20, it was briefly published ten years later
in Michael Joseph’s small compilation of rejected short stories entitled
The Editor Regrets and was not seen again until its rediscovery in 2007.
Rich in uncanny subject matter and subverted gender norms, it centers
on an obsessive love triangle between the anonymous male narrator,
his female love interest, Rebecca, and her life-size automaton, Julio. In
writing such a controversial tale, du Maurier depicted the newfound
Edwardian notions that sought to revise traditional notions of mascu-
linity and femininity from World War I. This period saw huge revolu-
tionary social change for British women as a result of various acts that
promoted greater gender equality.1
In her discussion of this immediate postwar-period Britain, Elaine
Showalter emphasizes the return of a widespread conservatism regard-
ing sex roles and gender issues despite the introduction of these acts
and states that “one of the main signs of this [movement] … was the
shift of feminist interests away from questions of women’s indepen-
dence to questions of women’s relationships to men” (197). In Daphne
du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (1998),
Horner and Zlosnik explore how the author’s early work reflects this
change as it shows how she intercepted “the traditional marriage plot
by demystifying romance with a new type of heroine … in pursuit of
her own fulfilment” (103). This became a distinctive feature of her nar-
ratives; many of her protagonists are either disinterested in traditional
male-female relationships or disenchanted by the men’s mistreatment
of women. They challenge the normative image of female sexuality
and romantic relationships by destabilizing “the heterosexual desire
which drives the plot” (Horner and Zlosnik 125). In other words, du
Maurier’s stories present female characters who are interested in seek-
ing out alternative pursuits that go beyond traditional domesticity and
motherhood.
This chapter will discuss “The Doll” as emblematic of the author’s
literary revolt against regressive societal notions through her experimen-
tation with gender and sexuality. More specifically, it will explore how
 Monstrous Femininity and Objectified Masculinity 23
her stories portray societal fears of emerging female independence in
their relationships with men, as this liberation also meant changes in
their sexual attitudes. In an attempt to maintain control over women’s
sexual identity despite their newfound freedom, society reinforced the
characterization of female promiscuity as a shameful and unnatural
trait. This is reflected in “The Doll” when du Maurier’s female character
attempts to practice the same sexual freedom as men and is condemned.
As the only female figure in a story where she is surrounded by male ad-
mirers who try but fail to engage with her, Rebecca’s disinterest in men
is impossible to ignore, and as events unfold, the reader cannot help but
focus on her disregard for the narrator as a potential suitor. This could
be read as a deliberate attempt on du Maurier’s part to depict her in a
different light to many of the mainstream heroines in literature of this
time who were often portrayed as being overly concerned with romance
and marriage.
In this story, the central female figure is painted as a vampire-like
femme fatale by the male protagonist whose descriptions are initially
influenced by his desire for her doll-like beauty and silence. His attrac-
tion to her, which causes him to be seemingly powerless around her,
raises the issue of female sexuality and its influence on men. Yet, his later
contempt for her unusual sexual practices, namely her involvement with
Julio the life-sized automated male doll, as well as her resulting disinter-
est in finding a natural male suitor, demonstrate how the overtly sexual
British woman of the 1920s could be regarded as a monstrous feminine
figure who objectified her love interests, and in doing so, threatened the
very foundations of traditional heterosexual unions. This chapter will
also explore how “The Doll” can be read as a seminal text for some of
du Maurier’s later works, particularly in relation to this story’s Rebecca,
a prototype in many ways for the infamous title character in her most
famous novel Rebecca (1938). The connection between these two char-
acters is particularly interesting to note not only because of the dominat-
ing presence that each one casts in her respective text, but also because
of how it ties her best-known and critically acclaimed story to a rejected
and long forgotten piece of work.

Monstrous Femininity in the Male Gaze

Narrative layers within “The Doll” are evident from the beginning as
the Russian-doll-like structure of a tale within a tale is used to advise the
reader that the proceeding events have been recorded in a shabby pocket
book that was found hidden among the rocks in “– Bay” (13). This delib-
erate omission of an exact location, as well as the mystery surrounding
the identity of the journal’s owner, illustrates the first of many gaps and
insinuations within the story. Further evidence of these features is dis-
closed by the finder of the journal who admits that, at times, his careful
24 Donna Mitchell
transcript contains spacing or dots between sentences whenever a word
or sentence is illegible. This confession confirms both his ignorance of
certain details and his position as an outsider to the recorded events.
The real narrator is the nameless owner of the journal whose identity
remains unknown for the duration of the story. Anonymity is a typical
feature of du Maurier’s early work—most notably evident in Rebecca—
as she wishes for the reader to focus on the complexity and interchanges
in the relationships among her characters rather than on the context in
which they are set (Forster 54). This is also a clever layering technique
in terms of character development as it presents one character through
the mind of another character. The first lines that follow the letter are
then especially significant as they offer the reader a first impression of the
anonymous narrator. His preoccupation with the matter of insanity is
immediately evident as he ponders whether “men realise when they are
insane,” and in doing, sets the tone of the story’s subject matter (14).
The entire tale is told through the “male gaze,” a concept developed
by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in order to explain the correlation
that stems from the “sexual imbalance” of a “split between [an] active/
male [onlooker] and [a] passive/female [recipient]” (19). The function of
this gaze is to project man’s “fantasy onto the female figure, which is
[then] styled accordingly” and “coded for strong visual and erotic im-
pact,” so that she can “play to and signify male desire” by being “on dis-
play [and] sexualized” (19–21). The gaze is present in this tale in terms
of how all details and descriptions of the other characters are told from
the narrator’s perspective, thereby suggesting that they are most likely
influenced by his opinion. This is most noticeable in his attitude toward
Rebecca as he disparages her for asserting she could never love him or
any other man. His condemnation continues with a careful dissection
of her physicality and part-by-part description in juxtaposing terms as
both virginal saint and sexual temptress:

[Y]our pale earnest face, your great wide fanatical eyes like a saint,
the narrow mouth that hid your teeth, sharp and white as ivory, and
your halo of savage hair …You have that fatal quality of silence …
You would be fatal to any man.
(15)

His repetition of the word “fatal” in this passage can be read as both
a defining term in relation to her character and a justification of his
inability to control his sexual attraction to her despite awareness of her
dangerous qualities. Soon afterward, he repeats other terms from this
passage to portray her as a “savage” woman with untamed and “wild”
hair (16).
Together, these descriptions create a portrait of a mysterious and
silent figure that is defined by her sexuality and therefore evocative of
 Monstrous Femininity and Objectified Masculinity 25
“The Fatal Woman” archetype. Christopher Frayling theorizes that
the introduction of this femme fatale “altered the whole direction of
the vampire tale from the mid-nineteenth century onwards [as she was
both] sexually aware and sexually dominant … attractive and repellent
at the same time” (qtd. in Horner and Zlosnik 111–12). The creation
of this stock character therefore exemplifies how literature reflected the
rising “cultural anxiety concerning adult female sexuality” (Horner and
Zlosnik 112). Rebecca’s status as a pseudo-vampire is secured by her
possession of an angelic beauty with “eyes like a saint [and] halo of
savage hair” and an underlying primitiveness that is signified by her con-
cealed teeth that were “sharp and white as ivory” (15). Such blending
of innocence and danger is reminiscent of Jonathan Harker’s account
of The Three Sisters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) whom Harker
initially believes to be “three young women, ladies by their dress and
manner” (46). His portrayal of them became an exemplary portrait of
the female vampire in literary texts:

All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the
ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that
made me uneasy … [One of them] arched her neck [and] actually
licked her lips like an animal.
(46–47)

The imagery here exemplifies how men have often projected and per-
petuated a link between sexuality and evil in women. This began as
a common practice in many primitive societies that was later contin-
ued in both early literature and religious ideology. The origin of this
association is most likely connected to a time when primitive people
were “subject to the same instinctive mating habits as animals,” which
subsequently meant that the sexual or menstruating female figure
“represented an enormous danger” to her male counterpart (Noddings
37). This was because anything that could “arouse their untamed desire”
and in doing so, distract them from their hunting duties, was considered
to be evil (37).
The power of female sexuality on the male recipient is demonstrated
in du Maurier’s tale when the narrator surrenders to his infatuation with
Rebecca. Her power over him and his ensuing obsession positions her
as a threat to the conventional status quo in terms of gender relations
as she represents the deadly threat of female sexuality with regard to
male supremacy. She can therefore be psychoanalytically defined as the
“monstrous feminine,” the “feminine excess [that] exorcises fears re-
garding female sexuality” (Gamble 253). This term is a simple reversal
of the traditional male monster, but “as with all other stereotypes of the
feminine … [the female monster] is defined in terms of her sexuality”
(Creed 3).
26 Donna Mitchell
Monstrous femininity, a trait shared by many of du Maurier’s female
figures, may have been inspired by some of the women in her life. Helen
Taylor’s introduction to du Maurier’s autobiography discusses the
author’s “contempt for the constraints and sheer dullness of orthodox
femininity in the early to mid-twentieth century” in terms of how it per-
vades her fiction through her unconventional heroines (Taylor xvi). She
subsequently asserts that du Maurier was “[u]nimpressed by the place
in history accorded to women” and so turned to literature to “[cross]
gender lines and [explore] her own disembodied spirit through fictional
conflicts of gender, creativity and subjectivity” (xii). As a result, her fe-
male characters have a tendency to depend on no one but themselves.
This lack of desire for human companionship is portrayed in a most
literal sense in “The Doll” as Rebecca chooses the company of her au-
tomaton over her human lover. Du Maurier’s delight at creating such
an unorthodox tale is detailed in a short diary entry from this time,
reproduced in her autobiography, where she admits to knowing that the
story was “pretty extravagant and mad” in terms of its subject matter
(Myself 127).
Additionally, her inspiration for such a controversial love story may
have stemmed from the unusual nature of her parental relationships
which made her “ambivalent about femininity” from a young age
(Taylor xvi). Despite being very close to her father during her childhood,
their bond became strained in later years due to his discomfort with her
maturation toward womanhood. Du Maurier confesses that he adored
her as a child but “became emotional, suspicious, [and] even posses-
sive” of her during her adolescent years (Myself 109). Her experience of
such strained emotions is evident in “The Doll” through the narrator’s
obsession with Rebecca. Du Maurier’s relationship with her mother was
also problematic from a young age and she openly admitted that they
were never close. Early diary entries reveal her disregard for her mother
whom she believed to be “the Snow Queen in disguise” and character-
ized as “wicked … an enemy” (Myself 11–12). The assertion that her
mother was a dangerous imposter reveals her preoccupation with evil
women and monstrous femininity from an early age. This is also ap-
parent in another early entry in which she concludes that “[e]vil women
[a]re more terrible than evil men” because they can use their beauty as a
masquerade of innocence such as “witches [who do] not have to be old
[and are] sometimes beautiful” (11). These passages reveal the author’s
fascination with the idea of female monstrosity, particularly in relation
to its ensuing ambiguity when disguised by the presence of beauty. This
is a combination that appears to be very much encapsulated in the nar-
rator’s portrayal of Rebecca, which suggests that her character may have
been inspired by her mother’s beauty and coldness, and could therefore
be read as du Maurier’s attempt to experiment with this aspect of female
identity.
 Monstrous Femininity and Objectified Masculinity 27
It is important to note that Rebecca’s monstrous femininity is greatly
emphasized by the choice of wording used in the narrator’s portrayal of
her. When describing her, he claims that she had an aversion to smiling
but tells the reader that on the rare occasions when she did, it was an
“unearthly” smile that caused her eyes to “be transfigured as if by a
shaft of silver” (17). Such imagery conveys folkloric notions of silver
bullets used to eliminate supernatural creatures such as werewolves or
vampires and alludes to her status as a threat to society. Her monstrous
femininity is further signified by the scarlet dress that she wears on her
next meeting with the narrator who conjures a Faustian analogy when
he likens her to the demon “Mephistopheles” (22).
She can also be read as an early prototype for the character of the
first wife in Rebecca both in terms of her appearance and her ability
to enthrall men. The narrator’s various accounts of her physicality are
almost identical to descriptions of the character of Rebecca in her most
celebrated novel as he notes that “she looked like an elf … [and had a]
slim body like a boy” (“The Doll” 16). The terms used in this particu-
lar description mirror that of Rebecca de Winter, whose elf-like beauty
and boyish physique are remembered by numerous characters who also
describe her as being “the most beautiful creature … ever” (Rebecca
144). In both cases, these women are presented as overtly sexual be-
ings that have an extraordinary effect on the men they encounter who
subsequently become powerless in their presence. Du Maurier’s creation
of a character that possesses such a paradoxical blend of androgynous
beauty and explicit sexuality is further evidence of her attempt to sub-
vert traditional gender norms within the text. Furthermore, the fact that
she repeats this combination in Rebecca suggests a deliberate presenta-
tion of a non-feminine version of female beauty and sexuality that is just
as appealing to the male figure as the stereotypically feminine woman.

Du Maurier’s Dolls
According to critic Ellen Datlow, “dolls, more than any other object,
demonstrate just how thin the line between love and fear, comfort and
horror, can be [for the onlooker]” (13). Possessing the ability to either
unnerve or comfort their observer, they have the potential to both “stim-
ulate our anxiety and help manage it” (Ribbin 114). The paradoxical
nature of their effect on humans is evident in du Maurier’s tale as the
narrator’s reaction to Rebecca is reminiscent of Nathaniel’s reaction to
the doll in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816). Although Nathanael
initially admires Olympia’s “exquisitely lovely face,” he is also wary of
her “strange blank” eyes until he imagines that they “flash open” under
his gaze, thus illustrating its power over the recipient (35). But despite
thinking that he has evoked such a strong reaction from her, he admits to
feeling “a terrible deathly frost surge through him [as] he looked into her
28 Donna Mitchell
eyes” (39). His distress may be linked to the reversal of the gaze which
occurs at the moment the male subject becomes the surveyed object and
the voyeuristic doll acquires the position of power. This also reveals the
(adult) human’s typical discomfort under the doll’s gaze which occurs
as a result of their realization that it is completely “devoid of life [and
therefore] lacking … the power of sight” (42–43). The lifelessness of
Olympia’s gaze is emphasized once more at the end of the story when
Nathanael finally recognizes that her “deathly pallid wax face had no
eyes, but black hollows in their stead [because] she was a lifeless doll”
(47). As Olympia acts as a substitute for the human lover, she can be
regarded as an uncanny double of the corporeal woman. 2 Nathanael’s
reaction to this revelation also demonstrates how the doll is completely
reliant on the child for the establishment of its identity as, “[w]ithout
the child’s compassion and imagination … [it] is a corpse” (Simms qtd.
in Sencindiver 116). This peculiarity becomes even more relevant in fan-
tastic texts due to the doll’s position within a genre that permits the
animation of lifeless objects.
The narrator’s adoration of Rebecca’s beauty and silence emphasizes
the correlation between the aforementioned male gaze and its objecti-
fication of women as is signified in “The Doll” through the narrator’s
desire to envisage Rebecca in doll-like terms linked to violence and con-
trol. After imagining how easy it would be to strangle her, he visualizes
her in inanimate terms noting that on her “face when dying – her lips
parted” and her eyes turned lifeless (18). Her death stamps her with a
doll’s standard facial expression. This fantasy—a doll-like object of de-
sire—reminds the reader of Olympia’s inert status in Hoffmann’s tale.
Immediately after his violent fantasy, the narrator uses similar terminol-
ogy to describe Rebecca’s demeanor during a violin recital. Although she
is objectified in a more benign way, he recounts how her eyes are “wide
open” and “her lips” likewise “parted in a smile” while she played. His
reaction to her performance is akin to a sexual climax as he admits to
losing himself in the music that was steadily “flying higher … it was
fulfilment” (18). Her doll-like silence is once again highlighted. In the
conversation that follows, she says little else apart from a confession that
she played the piece for him because she wanted to experience what it
felt like to play for a man. While this minimalist communication delights
him, he is disappointed upon their next meeting when their awkward
conversation is so loaded with pauses that he accuses her of becoming
“detached” toward him (20). He confesses that this attitude, as well as
her continued silence, causes him to feel a love for her that verges on jeal-
ousy and madness as he becomes obsessed with the mystery surrounding
her true identity.
The issue of objectified masculinity arises when the narrator is in-
troduced to Julio the doll. His immediate preoccupation with Julio’s
eyes mirrors his earlier fixation on Rebecca’s saintly eyes and raises the
 Monstrous Femininity and Objectified Masculinity 29
notion of the doll’s gaze once again as he provides a detailed description
of his love rival using a series of ominous and predatory terms:

[A] boy of about sixteen … His face was the most evil thing …
ashen pale … and the mouth was a crimson gash … the eyes were
cruel … and curiously still … The hair was sleek and dark, brushed
right back from the white forehead. It was the face of … a grinning
hateful satyr.
(23)

Julio’s status as an automaton is only revealed afterward, almost as an

afterthought when the narrator recalls that it was not a boy in the chair
but “a doll. Only a doll” (24). His discomfort at Rebecca’s possession
of the doll is immediately evident through his effort to reassure himself
that Julio was just a doll. But despite his attempt to belittle his rival,
Julio appears to have an unusual effect on Rebecca as she gets uncharac-
teristically excited in his presence and suddenly kisses the narrator. It is
not clear if she does this because she is aroused by the doll’s inanimate
presence or if this is simply an attempt to distract the narrator.
His distress at Julio’s presence remains throughout their encounter
and demonstrates the uncanny effect of the doll when it is “perceived
as [a] life-endangering” threat that can potentially “render the human
inanimate” (Sencindiver 113): “[W]hen I raised my eyes … I looked
straight into his damned doll’s eyes. They seemed to squint at me and
leer …his crimson treacherous mouth was twisted” (24). The narrator’s
emphasis on the doll’s red mouth in this passage gives a feminine quality
to its features. He quickly becomes fixated on Julio who, like Rebecca,
represents a version of the other due to his status as both inanimate
object and substitute lover. He can be regarded as a more dangerous
version however, in terms of his potential to compete for Rebecca’s af-
fection. This possibility, as well as Rebecca’s multiple attempts to keep
the doll hidden, feeds the narrator’s fixation with it. It also emphasizes
the fact that although the doll is physically absent from the text, it be-
comes an overwhelming presence that exists at its very core. As both the
climax of the story draws nearer and the narrator’s obsession grows, its
absent presence becomes more ominous and more difficult for the reader
to ignore. In a way, this makes the reader feel almost obsessive about it
too as they mirror the narrator’s torment at knowing that while the doll
does indeed exist, it cannot be seen as it remains just beneath the surface
of the text, hidden from view. Du Maurier’s ability to demonstrate not
only how absence can be regarded as an active condition—the act of
something being not present—but also the torment that such absence
can have on the human mind, is one of her greatest talents as a writer. It
is a much-celebrated feature of Rebecca when the anonymous narrator
is haunted by the absent other in the form of Rebecca’s ghost, who exists
30 Donna Mitchell
as both “a phantom in [the narrator’s] mind,” and a “textual creation
constructed in mystery” (Horner and Zlosnik 122–25). In both cases,
the focus of the obsession is a figure whose foreignness is regarded as
sinister in the mind of the narrator.

The Danger of the Baudrillardian Simulacrum

As their relationship becomes increasingly strained, the narrator of “The
Doll” resorts to using vampire terminology to describe Rebecca once
again. He claims that she was cold toward him and her “mouth was icy”
as she repeatedly rejected his advances (26). But despite his uncertainty
of her affection, he remains in her company though she is mostly silent
and refuses to provide any explanation of Julio’s history, nature, or rela-
tionship to her. She answers him in evasive terms and changes the subject
whenever Julio is mentioned, amplifying the existence of gaps and miss-
ing information in the narrative. Devastated at the loss of their relation-
ship, the narrator contrasts Rebecca’s allure to that of ordinary women,
claiming one cannot begin to imagine what kissing her is like in compari-
son. Once again, the exact details of their interaction remain undisclosed
as the reader is told that the following section is unintelligible as it con-
tains only broken sentences and half formed ideas. The next part of the
journal reveals details of his uninvited return to her apartment later the
same night. He confesses that all his fears were realized when he finds her
partaking in a sexual act with Julio. While details of this union are not
explicitly revealed, the journal describes how Rebecca is found locked
in a room and lying with the doll, which was essentially “a machine –
something worked by screws” (26). The narrator’s attempt to influence
the reader’s perception of Rebecca returns at this point when he recounts
“the unholy rapture in her eyes, and her ashen face” as she asks him
how she could possibly care for him or any other man (26). The descrip-
tive phrases here—“unholy rapture in her eyes” and her “ashen face”—
remind the reader once again of his earlier concerns regarding aspects
of her sexual identity such as her femme fatale status as both pseudo-
vampire and sexualized doll. His use of these depraved terms to depict her
interaction with Julio here can therefore be read as a deliberate attempt
to present her as an unnatural creature. More importantly however, it re-
veals that his portrayal throughout the journal has not been an objective
one, but rather one that has been heavily influenced by his disgust of her
sexual preference for an automaton over a natural man like him.
From a theoretical perspective, Rebecca’s possession of a male sex doll
can be analyzed in relation to the Baudrillardian simulacrum and the in-
terchangeable relationship between the sign and the real. Specifically, the
third stage of Baudrillard’s theory, which “marks the absence of basic
reality,” is applicable to Julio as it relates to the sign’s ability to “play at
being an appearance” of the real when in fact it has become an imitation
 Monstrous Femininity and Objectified Masculinity 31
copy with no original (6). In other words, the sign now represents a
hyperreality that is the binary opposite to any meaningful version of re-
ality. In this case, Rebecca’s infatuation with Julio—and her correlating
disinterest in real men—threaten the human man’s potential as lover and
mate. The doll in this equation therefore signifies the extinction of its
natural male predecessor. As a result, Rebecca’s love for Julio challenges
the very nature of sexual relations between men and women, threatening
the status quo. Her relationship with the doll precludes the narrator’s
potential to become her lover; Julio represents modernity’s emasculating
impacts on the natural man’s sexual function as it is no longer needed
or even desired in this instance. In other words, the reliability and de-
sirability of the doll ensures that man has been effectively removed from
the sexual equation.
Transferring his attention to Julio, the narrator describes his horror at
the motorized doll’s simultaneous state of animation and lifelessness, a
unification that emphasizes his uncanniness. This is a typical feature of
the doll figure in Gothic and horror narratives; they only become terri-
fying on account of human observers’ fear. In this instance, the narrator
is sickened to see “his filthy vile face looking at me. His eyes never left
me […] He was a machine—something worked by screws—he was not
alive, not human” and never recovers from his encounter with the doll
(29). He admits Rebecca left the following day and remains only as a
memory to torment him as he realizes that he will never see her again as
she has chosen Julio over him. By the end of the story, his fate seems to
be unclear as he confesses to feeling cursed and unable to cope or live
with such pain and rejection.
Du Maurier’s undeniably eccentric treatment of gender and sexuality
in this text can be read as a response to societal concerns regarding
women’s changing roles in Britain during the early years of the twentieth
century. Her ability to present a simple tale that is loaded with complex
subject matter relating to the power of female sexuality, the fragility
of male sexuality, and the objectification of both men and women il-
lustrates her developing skills as a young writer. Rebecca’s replacement
of a human lover with a sex doll in an effort to fulfill her sexual desire
suggests a rejection of male sexuality in favor of an automaton. Despite
the fact that electronic sex toys were relatively new developments at this
time, their existence added to existing concerns regarding the male suit-
or’s function in the independent woman’s newfound sexual identity and
correlating fears of man’s expiration. Furthermore, the notion that the
male suitor of this equation is effectively replaced by a motorized sex toy
becomes particularly interesting when considered in terms of the device’s
medical origins. Hysteria was considered a mental disorder that affected
only women and was caused by their wandering wombs or the womb’s
abnormal movement within the female body. By the early nineteenth
century, the most common treatment for this illness was for doctors to
32 Donna Mitchell
administer treatment in the form of a ‘hysterical paroxysm’ or orgasm
to the patient in order to ease their symptoms. This manual practice
only ceased in the late 1880s when Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville in-
vented the first vibrator as a replacement tool to deliver a more efficient
form of physical therapy to the patient. Despite starting out as a med-
ical instrument, demand for the vibrator grew through advertisements
in magazines from c. 1900 and its appearance in pornographic movies
during the early 1920s. Even so, it was considered to be an offensive
product. It was subsequently removed from mainstream media during
the late 1920s and did not become popular again until the 1970s. The
device’s inescapable connection to female masturbation ensures that its
categorization as a taboo item remains intact even today. Such a con-
cept highlights how the subject matter of “The Doll” is so extremely
outrageous for its time. While the story may not possess the understated
elegance of some of du Maurier’s later works, it is unique in its revelation
of her condemnation of British society’s attempt to promote traditional
heterosexual unions in order to return women to domesticity, prevent
men from being subjected to the objectification suffered by their female
counterparts, and portray any alternative versions of female sexuality as
a form of monstrous femininity.

Notes
1 Such reforms included The Sex Discrimination Removal Act (1920), which
granted women access to legal professions, The Law of Property Act (1922),
which allowed men and women to inherit equal shares of property, and The
Matrimonial Causes Act (1923), which gave men and women equal rights to
men in the event of divorce. Furthermore, all British women won the right
to vote with the introduction of the Representation of the People (Equal
Franchise) Act (1928).
2 Freud based his definition of “the uncanny” on the German term, “unheim-
lich,” for which the English translation literally means “unhomely” and ex-
plained it as being something or someone that is both familiar (heimlich)
and unfamiliar (unheimlich), and therefore frightening. More significant in
the context of this chapter is Freud’s determination that the familiar figure
of the double in “the uncanny” is merely a consequence of mental processes/
telepathy, or an identification that results in a “doubling, dividing, and
inter-changing of the self” (Freud 12). In the case of Hoffmann’s characters,
the union between man and uncanny doll double (instead of woman) is per-
haps influenced by Nathanael’s desire to procure a beautiful partner despite
her corresponding silence and inanimate demeanor.

Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser,
U of Michigan P, 1994.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis.
Routledge, 1993.
 Monstrous Femininity and Objectified Masculinity 33
Datlow, Ellen. The Doll Collection. Tor Books, 2015.
Du Maurier, Daphne. Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer. Virago
Press, 2005.
———. The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories. Virago Press, 2005.
———. Rebecca. Orion Publishing, 2007.
———. “The Doll.” The Doll: The Lost Short Stories. Harper Collins, 2011.
Forster, Margaret. Daphne du Maurier. Arrow Books, 2007.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XVII (1917–1916), edited
by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1957, pp. 219–252.
Gamble, Sarah, editor. The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfemi-
nism. Routledge, 2006.
Hoffmann, E.T.A. The Sandman. Penguin Classics, 2016.
Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik. Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the
Gothic Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Noddings, Nel. Women and Evil. U of California P, 1991.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture,
1830–1980. Virago Press, 1987.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. The Guernsey Press, 1992.
Taylor, Helen, editor. Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer by Daphne
du Maurier. Virago Press, 2005.
Yi Sencindiver, Susan. “The Doll’s Uncanny Soul.” The Gothic and the Everyday:
Living Gothic, edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maria Beville, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014, pp. 103–130.
3 Uncanny Mediums
Haunted Radio, Feminine
Intuition, and Agatha
Christie’s “Wireless”
Julia Panko

Agatha Christie is often described in terms antithetical to the concerns

of this book. Rather than the transgressive world of the fantastic, hers
is the rational world of detective fiction, where social order is restored
through the solving of the crime; rather than radical or feminist, she is
socially and politically conservative; rather than the formal experimen-
tation of the modernists, her work is known for its establishment of
highly formulaic genre conventions. Although more recent criticism has
contested all of these claims, they nonetheless constitute the dominant
account of Christie’s work. Yet fantastic elements recur throughout her
writing. During the 1920s, as Christie emerged as the most celebrated
writer of “Golden Age” detective fiction, she also published fiction fea-
turing supernatural subjects including ghosts, mediums, and uncanny
premonitions.
This chapter focuses on one of these stories: “Wireless,” first published
in 1926, in which Mary Harter hears the voice of her long-dead husband
Patrick over her new radio set. After the elderly (and wealthy) woman has
been literally frightened to death, the reader learns that the “ghost” was
a hoax perpetrated by Mary’s debt-ridden nephew Charles Ridgeway,
who wired the radio so he could speak through it. On its face, “Wire-
less” overcomes its fantastic setup when this truth is revealed. “Wireless”
would seem, then, to be an example of the “explained supernatural” in
the tradition of Ann Radcliffe, as close to detective fiction as to the ghost
story. Yet the story’s suggestion that Mary’s intuitive fears of the radio
were accurate premonitions of danger, coupled with the tale’s ambiguous
ending hinting that Charles has received supernatural punishment for his
crime, disrupts the reestablishment of a rationalist universe.
My reading of “Wireless” considers what it means for a radio to be a
fantastic object, as well as a gendered object, in two contexts: the me-
dia culture of the 1920s and Christie’s writing as it bridges the divide
between detective fiction and fantastic fiction. Radios were frequently
figured as uncanny media in the early twentieth century, and their abil-
ity to channel disembodied voices across space laid the foundation for
a subgenre of narratives involving ghostly wireless communication.
I read Christie’s story as a transitional text for radio: the tale is, I argue,
 Uncanny Mediums 35
indicative of the ways radio’s uncanniness persisted and evolved as radio
broadcasting replaced point-to-point transmission. “Wireless” also ex-
emplifies how radio culture was gendered in the 1920s, and I claim that
Christie uses the apparently haunted wireless set to expose and critique a
gendered gap in communication among the living. Specifically, I contend
that she contrasts Charles’s and Mary’s views of the radio in order to
code positivism and technical expertise as masculine qualities. Compar-
ing “Wireless” to her other supernatural fiction from the 1920s, I argue
further that Christie critiques positivism on the grounds that it lacks a
more intuitive grasp of truth—an ability she primarily associates with
women and with men who possess traditionally “feminine” qualities.

Agatha Christie’s Fantastic Fiction

The 1920s were a significant decade for Agatha Christie. She published
her first novel in 1920; by 1930, she had published another ten and
more than fifty short stories, introduced Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane
Marple, and solidified the reign of Golden Age detective fiction. British
women writers dominated this genre, most notably Christie, Dorothy
L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham. The genre’s popularity was due in
part to the postwar climate: in the wake of the Great War’s shocking
violence, these so-called “cozy” mysteries offered a calmly intellectual
pleasure. Ghost stories offered another fictional salve: after the war and
the Spanish flu left huge swathes of the English population in mourning,
interest in spiritualism, as well as sensationalist supernatural tales, grew.
Collections of ghost stories were popular, with one of the most notable
being the first volume of The Ghost Book anthology (1927), edited by
Cynthia Asquith. Periodicals devoted to the weird and the supernatu-
ral also flourished, including Ghost Stories magazine (in which both
Asquith and Christie published).
While supernatural and occult themes appear throughout 1920s de-
tective fiction, the ghost story and the detective story are often held to be
oppositional forms. As Michael Cook explains:

According to [Julia] Briggs, the ghost story thrived in the late

Victorian and Edwardian period because it constantly glanced back
to a less skeptical age before scientific advances … If we contrast
this with M. R. James’s view that ‘The detective story cannot be too
much up-to-date: the motor, the telephone, the aeroplane, the new-
est slang are all in place,’ the perception, if not the reality, is of two
incompatible forms.
(2)1

One might add that where the ghost story posits the unexplained and
supernatural, the detective story reasserts a rationalist, and solvable,
36 Julia Panko
universe. While early twentieth-century detective fiction frequently
incorporates Gothic or ghostly elements for dramatic effect, the truth
revealed by the crime’s solving is typically mundane rather than fantas-
tic. Maurizio Ascari argues that

Christie reduced the supernatural to the subsidiary role of transitory

explanation, but at the same time she also exploited it to conjure up
an ominous atmosphere of mystery that lures the public into reading
and is progressively cleared away by the investigation.
(172)

In The Sittaford Mystery (1931), for instance, the séance that opens the
story—in which a death is announced via spirit communication—turns
out to be a ploy by the murderer to establish a false time of death and
secure his alibi.
Ghosts, mediums, and other spiritualist themes are especially prevalent
in Christie’s fiction from the 1920s and early 1930s. Psychic visions, for-
tunetellers, and séances are present, albeit revealed to be hoaxes, in works
including “The Mystery of the Blue Jar” (1924), “The Blue Geranium”
(1929), and Peril at End House (1932). Christie did not always explain
the supernatural away, however, and a number of her works from this
period explore this subject seriously. In “The Red Signal” (1924), a man
receives uncanny premonitions of danger. In “The Lamp” (1924), the
ghost of a child haunts the house of a sickly boy. “The Fourth Man”
(1925) recounts the story of a woman who survives death by possessing
another woman’s body. In “The Last Séance” (1926), a medium dies in
the act of materializing a woman’s dead child. These and other stories
were collected with “Wireless” in The Hound of Death (1933), which
also includes stories about a man who meets the god Pan (“The Call of
Wings”) and a witch who transfers a man’s soul into a cat’s body (“The
Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael”).
Before publication in The Hound of Death, “Wireless” first ap-
peared in the Sunday Chronicle Annual in December 1926. 2 This
was a tumultuous year for Christie personally. First, her mother
died. Christie would later write in her autobiography that her family
“always claimed [their mother] was a clairvoyant” (19). Later in 1926,
after discovering that her husband was having an affair, Christie fa-
mously went missing. Her disappearance was widely reported, and
during the nationwide search that culminated in the discovery that
she was staying in a hotel in Yorkshire, supposedly suffering from
amnesia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to assist the search by
bringing one of Christie’s gloves to a medium. I include these details
not to suggest a biographical interpretation of “Wireless,” but rather
to note the resonances that the story’s interlinked themes of supernat-
ural communication and death had to Christie’s own life.
 Uncanny Mediums 37
Radio Ghosts
“Wireless” begins with a diagnosis: Mary Harter, true to her name, has
a “cardiac weakness” (137). Dr. Meynell tells Mary’s nephew Charles
that she is likely to live for a long time but must avoid sudden shocks.
Following the doctor’s advice to introduce cheerful distraction into her
life, Charles buys her a new radio—a wireless set. Mary is both dubious
and fearful, but Charles insists, and she becomes slowly accustomed to
the device. Several months later, Mary hears the voice of her husband
Patrick through the radio, warning that he will soon be coming for her.
The ghostly voice speaks to her two more times, finally declaring he
will appear on Friday. That night, as promised, Mary sees “[i]n the dim
light … a familiar figure with chestnut beard and whiskers and an old-
fashioned Victorian coat” (152). Terrified, her heart fails. At this point,
the narrative perspective shifts. Charles, whom the reader learns has
been facing ruin, reflects on his satisfaction at his inheritance. He de-
taches the wire he used to channel his voice through the radio and burns
the fake beard he wore to impersonate Patrick. But Mary, worried about
her impending death, had sent for her will to make sure it was in order;
and, as she collapsed in fear, the will fell from her hand into the fire-
place. Her inheritance goes instead to the recipient of her former will:
her niece, a mother of four, from whom Mary had grown distant. The
story ends in ellipses, as Charles contemplates his fate: “Damn them all!
No hope in front of him—only the shadow of a prison wall […] He felt
that Somebody had been playing with him—playing with him like a cat
with a mouse. Somebody must be laughing […]” (160).
Although the titular radio set of “Wireless” turns out not to be
haunted, the story employs the trope of haunted radio. As such, it pro-
vides an opportunity to examine how 1920s media culture underpinned
writers’ imaginings of the supernatural. Media might seem to embody
qualities opposed to the supernatural; as Sir Eustace Pedler puts it in
The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), “ghosts don’t affect typewriters”
(69). Yet the history of media has often been a history of ghost stories,
and vice versa. Communication media shaped spiritualism—its investi-
gations, its deceptions, its metaphors—and media have featured prom-
inently in Gothic novels from The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Dracula
(1897) to House of Leaves (2000).3
Radios were frequently connected with ghosts. In 1922, Popular
Radio published an article by the prominent paranormal investigator
Hereward Carrington, titled “Will We Talk to the Dead by Radio?”
He asks:

Will it be possible in the near future to send wireless messages, or

establish some analogous mode of communication with the spirit
world…? Recent remarkable advances in wireless, on the one hand,
38 Julia Panko
and in psychical research on the other, would seem to indicate that
something of the sort is not beyond the bounds of possibility.
(93)

Carrington’s were not fringe beliefs. As Jeffrey Sconce has described, a

number of scientists, including radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi, tried
to contact the dead using electronic media—evidence not only of the
growing scientism of spiritualist investigations but also of the specific
fantasies about disembodied consciousness that radio transmission en-
abled.4 Wireless, as Sconce argues, represented the “unsettling phenom-
enon of distant yet instantaneous communication through the open air”
and “suggested that one’s consciousness might someday be free to encir-
cle the earth in a form of electronic omniscience” (62, 63).
Radios were also linked to ghosts through their use by fraudulent
spiritualist mediums. “Radio,” wrote Harry Houdini, in a 1922 arti-
cle also published in Popular Radio, “at present is the greatest aid to
the fraud mediums” (107). Houdini was not altogether opposed to
Carrington’s philosophy—he wrote that he “hope[d] that spirits will
talk to us through radio instruments some day”—but he was angry that
“radio has given the ‘spirit business’ an enormous boost,” allowing “so-
called psychics” to make objects from paintings to tea kettles appear
to channel the voices of the dead (107, 102). The tea kettle is especially
suggestive: what could be more domestic? Like the ghost story, Golden
Age detective fiction often plays on the uncanny effect of the everyday
object turned sinister. 5 Many of Christie’s murder weapons are “the ba-
nal impedimenta of home life,” objects like “the kitchen pestle, the meat
skewer, the golf club” (Light 94). What is notable about Mary Harter’s
haunted wireless set is not that it is a domestic object that becomes
ghostly or dangerous, but that its portrayal as such is firmly in keeping
with the ways that, by the 1920s, radios were overdetermined in their
association with the supernatural.
Fantastic radio stories constituted their own subgenre. Sconce, in his
detailed and engaging account of these narratives, discusses their com-
mon attributes: tropes of separated lovers; motifs of ocean travel; themes
of melancholy, loneliness, and alienation.6 But Christie’s haunted wire-
less set—as opposed to haunted communication via wireless telephony
or wireless telegraphy—was a rather new contribution. Compare “Wire-
less” to Earl Ennis’s “The Conscience Shop” (1922), another radio hoax
story. In Ennis’s story, a simulated supernatural voice is used to frighten
a swindling businessman into returning stolen money; but it is a wire-
less receiver hidden in the villain’s home, rather than a radio set, that
channels the voice. The year 1922 marked a crucial shift for radio: from
the point-to-point communication of individual wireless operators to
broadcast radio. The British Broadcasting Corporation was founded
 Uncanny Mediums 39
that year, and its programs were broadcast nationally and received
simultaneously by a newly constituted listening public. Thus, narra-
tives featuring lone voices channeled to isolated listeners—including
Rudyard Kipling’s “Wireless” (1902) and Lee Foster Hartman’s “Out
of the Air” (1922)—reflect pre-broadcast radio culture. Sconce argues
that, when broadcasting became the dominant use for radio, “the once
spectral presence of radio no longer appeared as a mysterious ‘voice
from the void,’ becoming instead the familiar ‘live’ and ‘living’ voices of
the national networks” (93).
“Wireless” disrupts this paradigm. Mary’s radio picks up programs,
but it also channels an individual voice directly to her. Christie’s story
suggests there might still be an eerie quality to radio transmission in the
broadcasting era, and that the radio set itself was uncanny by associ-
ation. As in the pre-1922 stories Sconce discusses, “Wireless” focuses
on a pair of lovers whose communication apparently transcends death;
here, too, the tone is melancholy, reflecting the distance death creates.
Mary’s fatal fright comes with the realization that “[t]wenty-five years
is a long time. Patrick is a stranger to me now” (152, emphasis in orig-
inal). The eeriness of this one-to-one communication, however, is inten-
sified by broadcast radio. “Patrick’s” first communication interrupts a
performance of “Annie Laurie,” a ballad whose protagonist swears he
would “lay down [his] head and die” “for bonnie Annie Laurie” (“Annie
Laurie” 35). These themes of death and love link the broadcast content
to the ghostly communication, demonstrating that radio’s uncanniness
persisted beyond the advent of broadcasting—a point also evidenced
by the prevalence of Gothic narratives in the first several decades of
broadcast radio.7 Indeed, the fact that Mary’s radio picks up first
national broadcasts, then international transmissions accompanied by
the “discordant shrieks” and “unearthly howl[s]” of tuning noise, and
only finally the ghostly voice, shows broadcasting to exist already on a
continuum of strangeness, bringing unsettling and (unsettlingly foreign)
voices into the home (142, 140).

Radio and the Gender Gap

In its representation of the radio set as a fantastic object, “Wireless”
reveals the extent to which gender inflected radio culture. Prior to broad-
casting, radio hobbyists tended to be male: “[t]he association of radio
and boys was so strong, in fact, that the story of two girls building a
wireless set by themselves (‘refusing all help from father and brother’)
warranted an entire feature article” (Sconce 101). One 1922 radio ad-
vertisement touted the fact that “[a]nybody can make the simple connec-
tions required, including mother and the girls” (RCA advertisement 15).
Christie uses the assumption that radio expertise was a male domain
40 Julia Panko
to highlight and examine a problematic imbalance in communication
between men and women. In “Wireless,” uses of the radio break down
along gendered lines. Mary passively consumes programs while Charles
actively tinkers, setting up and tuning the wireless as well as manip-
ulating it. The linking of radio to male expertise—and to murder—
recurs in Christie’s 1920s fiction. In “The Face of Helen” (1927), a
young man who worked on poison gases during the war attempts to
murder a woman by giving her a glass bubble and a radio. The bubble
contains poison gas, and he plans to have her listen to a broadcast per-
formance in which a tenor sings a note capable of shattering glass. As in
“Wireless,” a radio proffered as a gift is intended as a murder weapon.
In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), one of Poirot’s most important
clues is that the murderer, Dr. Sheppard, has constructed a “home-made
wireless set” (239). When it becomes clear that the murderer rigged a
Dictaphone to confuse the time of death, Poirot realizes that Dr. Shep-
pard had the “mechanical turn of mind” necessary to orchestrate the
crime (297).
“Wireless” critiques men’s use of technological expertise to manipulate
and obfuscate. The story begins with a conflict in communication:
“‘Above all, avoid worry and excitement,’ said Dr. Meynell, in the com-
fortable fashion affected by doctors. Mrs. Harter, as is often the case
with people hearing these soothing but meaningless words, seemed
more doubtful than relieved” (137). This scene, which opens the story,
establishes a structural irony along gender lines. Charles’s communica-
tion style similarly epitomizes both male expertise and its power to dom-
inate. When Mary expresses concerns about the wireless—she fears it
will emit harmful electricity—Charles speaks “of bright-emitter valves,
of dull-emitter valves, of high frequency and low frequency, of ampli-
fication and of condensers. Mrs. Harter, submerged in a sea of words
she did not understand, surrendered” (139). “In his element … turn[ing]
knobs,” Charles speaks “in a superior and kindly fashion,” “discoursing
eloquently” as he delivers “quite a lecture” to Mary (140, 139, 138). He
is “something of an authority on the subject” of radio (139). Charles
is “fluent and persuasive” (echoing an earlier description of Meynell
speaking “fluently”) (138, 137). These details drive home how concert-
edly Christie connects Charles’s radio expertise to his ability to control
his aunt.
A story ostensibly about communication with the dead, then, turns out
to be most concerned with communication among the living. The radio
is simultaneously an object of terror, the murder weapon, and an em-
blem of Charles’s duplicitousness. It also reveals a disjunction in the way
men and women view reality, suggesting that women have a greater ac-
cess to truth. For the haunted radio is not the story’s only uncanny me-
dium. Christie suggests Mary has intuitive insight: while her fear of radios
as “newfangled things” whose “electric waves … might affect her” paints
 Uncanny Mediums 41
her as an old-fashioned luddite, she is correct that the radio poses a
threat to her—even if she misattributes the source of its menace, and
even if her “knowledge of the subject [of radios] was of the vaguest”
(compare the characterization of her nephew as an “authority”) (138,
139). Mary’s gut reaction is that the radio is a “repellant object,” and her
initial antipathy toward it is proven well founded by story’s end (140).
What may seem a minor plot point in “Wireless”—a woman has un-
canny insight into future danger—is a repeating motif in Christie’s fic-
tion from the period. In “The Last Séance” (1926), the supernatural
elements are real: Simone is a medium who uses her own body to mate-
rialize the ghost of a little girl, the daughter of the menacing Madame
Exe.8 Simone longs to quit after having a premonition that this act will
be fatal. Simone’s husband Raoul, an engineer (another technical ex-
pert), insists she continue; he is swayed by the regard she has garnered
among professors and doctors (more experts), and he reminds her that
she has promised to sit for Madame Exe again. During the eponymous
episode, Madame Exe approaches the ghost of her daughter, heedless of
Raoul’s warnings that touching her may destroy Simone. Exe swoops
the girl into her arms and flees. Simone is discovered collapsed in her
chamber, “all shrunken away” to “half her usual size” (313, emphasis in
original).9 In both “Wireless” and “The Last Séance,” the victim fore-
sees her death and correctly identifies the agent of her destruction (the
radio and the mother, respectively). The similarities between the stories
connect spiritualist channeling to communication technology as well as
to gender: “Wireless” substitutes a radio set for a woman’s body as the
medium that facilitates contact with the dead. Communication technol-
ogies and female spiritualists were both referred to as “medium” during
this period, and Jill Galvan has demonstrated that perceptions of women
as possessing “sensitivity or sympathy” established connections between
the two kinds of medium (2).
Where Mary and Simone are proven correct in their premonitions, the
men in these stories are deluded by their own expertise. Simone warns
Raoul that he cannot understand either the supernatural or the dangers of
a mother’s passion: “You know much, Raoul, but even you do not know
what it all means” (298). Her indictment is prophetic, for the story closes
on Raoul’s repeated assertion of his lack of knowledge: when asked,
“What has been happening here?,” Raoul replies, “‘I do not know …
I do not know. I do not know’” (313). In “Wireless,” Dr. Meynell’s
diagnosis proves incorrect: Mary’s death was actually imminent, as her
heart condition was far worse than he realized. Due to her actual cardiac
state, had Charles done nothing to hasten his aunt’s death, he would
have comfortably inherited her estate in time to save himself. The doctor
also incorrectly pronounces that Mary “had been having hallucinations
about her dead husband’s voice,” of course failing to account for the
real voice that Mary heard (153). The lawyer who executes Mary’s will
42 Julia Panko
also errs in his certainty: “there is only one conclusion possible. Your
aunt sent for that will in order to destroy it” (157). As previously noted,
Mary had sent for her will to check that it was in order. In these stories,
unyieldingly rational positivism is gendered as masculine and critiqued
as oblivious to the truth. The result is a rift between men and women—
and, consequently, a disruption of the modern family.
Advertisements for radios in the 1920s presented a different picture,
representing the technology as a positive force that united the family.
Frequently, advertising images were variations on the same basic com-
position: the radio set is positioned near the picture’s center, with the
mother, father, and children all turned toward it. Although seated close
to one another, each is individually occupied with a separate task—the
father reading, the mother knitting, young boys doing homework; yet all
are angled toward the wireless set. The message is clear: radio brings the
family together.
The illustrations that accompanied the publication of “Wireless”
in the Sunday Chronicle Annual disrupt this iconography. Mary and
Charles are positioned as if staring at one another. Mary sits near the
edge of the left-hand page; near the center of the two-page spread, on
her side, is the listening apparatus. Across the page divide, still close to
the center, is the wireless set, which Charles leans toward from his po-
sition near the edge of the right-hand page as he plugs in a wire. Mary
looks shocked as Charles glares menacingly. In this image, as in adver-
tisements of the time, the radio stands at the center; here, however, the
link it establishes between Mary and Charles is direct, as well as unset-
tling.10 The domestic fissures signaled so strongly in Christie’s fiction,
as in this image, are present even in the advertisements. All heads may
be turned toward the radio, but eye contact among listeners is rare. It is
to the radio, not to each other, that each individual is connected. Radio
broadcasting formed national and international listening communities,
but it could foster alienation among members of a family, even in the
most intimate domestic settings.
Christie’s fiction evokes disenchantment with modern domesticity and
deep ambivalence about familial intimacy. For Christie, the tension be-
tween connection and isolation so integral to radio culture was symp-
tomatic of larger patterns of alienation. Lovers in her stories are as apt to
murder as to marry. Nephews value inheritance over kinship. Motherhood
is monstrous, as doubly emblematized by the grotesqueness of Madame
Exe and by the destruction of Simone’s body by bringing the spirit child
into existence, a twisted parody of childbirth.11 Lynette Carpenter
and Wendy K. Kolmar argue that “women’s ghost stories borrow and
develop from the Gothic both its critique of domestic ideology and its
exploration of the dangers women face in the private sphere of the home
and family as well as its subversive potential” (xxv). Christie’s detective
fiction, too, “deal[s] in domestic inquisitions,” “monitoring … the plots
 Uncanny Mediums 43
of family life … [in order] to upset the Victorian image of home, sweet
home” (Light 61). Christie’s strongest condemnations concern familial ties
that have become meaningless and perfunctory. Not insignificantly, her
two most famous detectives are unmarried.

Feminine Intuition: From the Medium to the Detective

“Wireless” illuminates radio’s connections to the supernatural, in the
process revealing a gender divide stemming from conflicting epistemol-
ogies. Christie’s work destabilizes the boundary between detective fic-
tion and supernatural fiction by suggesting that more intuitive forms of
knowledge are necessary to a full understanding of truth. The modern,
rational positivism exemplified by characters like Charles and Raoul,
Christie suggests, must be complemented by intuition. Mary Harter,
Simone, and other female characters in Christie’s fantastic fiction from
this period—the vision-seeing nun in “The Hound of Death” (1933), for
example, or the psychic woman in “The Gypsy” (1933)—are character-
istic. In the first Miss Marple story, an artist declares that “women have
an intuition that is denied to men” (“The Tuesday Night Club” 10). The
statement is undercut by irony (the artist does not correctly guess the
solution to the mystery herself), but Christie’s fiction often implies that,
if there is not quite such a thing as woman’s intuition, sensitivity toward
nonrational forms of knowledge is a capability more easily accessed by
feminine people. Thus Mr. Satterthwaite—the insightful protagonist
who solves the mysteries of Christie’s Harley Quin stories, which strad-
dle the line between detective fiction and fantastic fiction, and which
were all first published in the 1920s—is described as having “a large
share of femininity” and “fussy old-maidish ways” (“The Coming of
Mr. Quin” 2; “The World’s End” 97).12
Supernatural insight is not strictly a feminine quality in her fiction; men
experience visions and premonitions, or see ghosts, in stories including
“The Red Signal” (1924), “The Lamp” (1924), and “SOS” (1926). In
fact, the character with whom feminine intuition is most consistently as-
sociated is Hercule Poirot. As the epitome of the Golden Age detective,
Poirot tends to be characterized as the paragon of rational deduction. In
Ronald Knox’s “Ten Commandments” of Golden Age fiction, first codi-
fied in 1924, the detective must not “ever have an unaccountable intuition
which proves to be right” (190).13 He or she must instead use observation
and reason. Such unwavering positivism is rooted in a tradition of mascu-
line detection, most notably that of Sherlock Holmes. Golden Age fiction,
however, is less a direct continuation of the Sherlock Holmes model of
the detective than it is a postwar reimagining of the detective during a
time “when gender delineations were beginning to shift and the detective
novel was one of the spaces to develop a less manly, less heroic form of
masculinity” (Makinen 28).14
44 Julia Panko
Poirot’s defining traits are markedly feminine: he is given to consum-
ing sweets, tidying shelves, and fastidiously grooming his mustache. He
is also intuitive, relying on insight and instinct as much as ratiocination.
In his first case, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), Poirot cites an
“instinct that led [him] to insist on examining … coffee-cups” that turn
out to offer a crucial clue, and he describes instinct as “a marvelous
thing” that “can neither be explained nor ignored” (54, 112). In another
novel, remarking on women’s apparently fantastic powers of insight,
Poirot clarifies that the ability is rooted in the subconscious synthesis of
carefully observed details:

‘Les femmes,’ generalized Poirot. ‘They are marvelous! They invent

haphazard—and by miracle they are right. Not that it is that, really.
Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without
knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these
little things together—and they call the result intuition’.
(The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 157)

Elsewhere, Christie suggests that feminine intuition resists rational

explanation. In The Man in the Brown Suit, for example, the intuition of
female characters is inexplicably proven correct on multiple occasions.
Her works cover a spectrum of opinions regarding whether such insights
are explainable, inexplicable, or even supernatural in origin, and precise
distinctions among insight, instinct, and intuition vary across her oeuvre.
What is consistent is that such forms of knowing are necessary, as well
as feminine. Merja Makinen has argued that Christie “blurs the bound-
aries between ratiocination and intuition, and accommodates feminine
and feminised forms of detecting, or of knowledge” (63). Christie’s de-
tectives enact a type of knowing that is as much indebted to the figure of
the spiritualist medium as to Sherlock Holmes.
In its emphasis on uncanny modes of knowing, Christie’s fantastic fic-
tion tells us something about her detective fiction, even as it unravels the
clear line between them. Many of her mystery stories feature mediums
and visions, and her detectives are themselves mediumistic (a quality
made explicit upon occasion, as when Poirot holds a mock séance in
order to force a confession in Peril at End House). Both medium and
detective attempt “to make the dead speak in order to reveal a truth”
(Willis 60). The nature of that truth and the optimal method for its
discovery are the fundamental questions of detective fiction. Christie’s
point is rarely that positivism, reason, or scientific knowledge is wrong
in and of itself. Rather, it is that, without intuition—without knowledge
rooted in emotional awareness, attentiveness to the details of domestic
life, and openness to supernatural insight—these modes of knowledge
are insufficient, even deceptive.
 Uncanny Mediums 45
Spiritualism and science were not entirely at odds during the interwar
period. Organizations like the Society for Psychical Research promoted
the scientific investigation of the paranormal, and researchers sought to
produce incontrovertible evidence that would verify the existence of spir-
itualist phenomena on scientific grounds. In “Wireless,” Mary attempts
to bring scientific principles to bear on her supernatural experience:

In a confused way she tried to think over all that Charles had ex-
plained to her of the theory of ether waves. Could it be … [t]hat his
actual voice had been wafted through space? There were missing
wave lengths or something of that kind. She remembered Charles
speaking of ‘gaps in the scale.’ Perhaps the missing waves explained
all the so-called psychological phenomena?
(144)

This language is reminiscent of Carrington’s discussion of radio com-

munication with the dead: “The activity of the mind does actually
modify the ether and send forth definite vibrations, not unlike radio im-
pulses” (94). By documenting her experiences, Mary even hopes to use
her death to “prove beyond question the possibility of communication
with the spirit world” (149). Ironically, she errs the most in perceiving
her situation when she abandons her irrational anxieties for science and
reason.
“Wireless” is arguably at its most feminist in its leveraging of such
irony. The characterization of Christie as socially conservative is long-
standing; without wishing to reposition her as particularly radical, I
would echo critics like Light, Rowland, and Makinen that Christie’s
fiction tends to condemn gendered imbalances of power and to grant
agency and sympathy to women across a range of social positions.15 I
would add that Christie’s concerted and deliberate use of formal ele-
ments, including irony, works as a metafictional strategy to grant her
own (female) authorial voice discursive control. In “Wireless,” for exam-
ple, as throughout her fiction, Christie self-consciously plays with genre
conventions. She never employs the extreme formal experimentation
of high modernist style, but her work shares with more conventionally
modernist fiction “a search for different and more appropriate forms”
(Light 66). In “Wireless,” this attention to the forms and artifices of
narrative contributes to the story’s ambiguity regarding the existence
of the supernatural. “Wireless” punctures the illusion that the radio is
haunted, but the supernatural is not entirely explained away. In addi-
tion to Mary’s uncanny premonitions, the sustained ironies in the story’s
ending suggest that larger powers are at work. That Charles does not
profit from his crime is only the most obvious irony. He also takes on
attributes of both the ghost and the haunting victim, a transformation
that suggests supernatural punishment.
46 Julia Panko
Learning that he will inherit nothing, Charles hears the lawyer’s “voice
speaking from a long way off” (159). This echoes earlier descriptions of
the ghost’s voice sounding as if it had come from “far away” (144). The
echoes multiply: the “sensation as of cold water trickling down his back”
Charles feels recalls the earlier description of Mary “feel[ing] as though
an icy hand were laid on her heart” (156, 151); like Mary, he feels “a far-
off premonition of unpleasantness” before he learns his fate (155); and
he eventually sees a vision of Mary, a “picture rising before his eyes,”
paralleling her vision of Patrick (156). As he becomes haunted, he also
becomes more ghostly. His own voice is strange, like a disembodied voice
heard over a wireless: “hear[ing] a hoarse voice—his own,” he notes that
his voice “sounded unreal to himself” (158, 156). That Charles is de-
scribed as going “about his duties mechanically” emphasizes the extent
to which his ghostliness is linked to the radio (154). Such details re-center
Christie as the text’s ultimate authority.16 The referent of Charles’s vague
foreboding that “Somebody had been playing with him” is not speci-
fied. Is this “Somebody” Patrick? Mary? Fate? Calling attention to their
author, these textual details make Christie herself a potential referent. Her
full name was Agatha Mary Clarissa, and she published novels under the
pseudonym Mary Westmacott starting in 1930; perhaps, in “Wireless,”
the author avenges her textual namesake. In this interpretation, Christie
herself functions like a medium, communicating the story to the reader.17

*****
Christie’s portrayal of a radio as a fantastic object reveals the ways
gender, media culture, and conceptions of the supernatural were mu-
tually constitutive in the 1920s. Like Christie’s other detective stories,
“Wireless” meditates on the dangers of a modern masculinity that is
proficient in tinkering with gadgets and plotting murders but lacking
in empathy as well as intuition. Like her other fantastic stories, it sug-
gests a realm beyond the ordinary that we might tune into could we just
develop the sensitivity and find the right frequency. Modernist studies
increasingly seeks to theorize how the period’s media ecology influenced
and inspired its authors, providing the metaphors, as well as the mecha-
nisms, of communication. We can enrich this critical project by looking
to genre fiction such as Christie’s, as its own attempts to establish forms,
and to interrogate how reality may be understood and represented, also
hinged on encounters with media.

Notes
1 Cook himself contests this view, viewing the ghost story as “a building block
of the detective fiction narrative” (2). I will return to the similarities between
these genres.
2 “Wireless” was published in the United States as “Where There’s a Will.”
 Uncanny Mediums 47
3 On the history of spiritualism as it intersects with media history, see Jeffrey
Sconce’s Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Televi-
sion and Jill Galvan’s The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the
Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919.
4 Sconce, Haunted Media, Chapter 2.
5 The concept of the uncanny captures the epistemological uncertainty of such
objects—their staging of a conflict between primitive, animistic fears and
modern rationalism. As a subset of everyday objects, haunted radios offer
a testing ground for the uncanny’s applicability to sound media: as Penny
Florence notes, “[t]he tropes of the uncanny are visual,” and Freud’s dis-
cussion of the concept “is very much about sight, even or especially when it
concerns its loss” (n.p.).
6 Sconce discusses these topics in chapters two and three of Haunted Media.
7 See Richard J. Hand’s “The Darkest Nightmares Imaginable: Gothic Audio
Drama from Radio to the Internet.”
8 “The Last Séance” was published in the November 1926 issue of Ghost
Stories magazine as “The Woman Who Stole A Ghost.”
9 Chris Willis notes that Christie’s descriptions of injunctions against touch-
ing mediums and of processes of spirit manifestation are accurate represen-
tations of historical spiritualist beliefs and practices (66–67).
10 I am grateful to the staff of the National Library of Scotland for sending me
images of “Wireless” in its initial publication context.
11 Susan Rowland notes that many mothers are murderers in Christie’s work
(166). Simone sums up the danger of maternal love: “There are certain prim-
itive elementary forces…. Most of them have been destroyed by civilization,
but motherhood stands where it stood at the beginning…. A mother’s love
for her child … crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path” (304).
Madame Exe’s physical description signals this monstrousness. She is re-
peatedly described as masculine (a “great gendarme of a woman,” with “[g]
reat big strong hands, as strong as a man’s” [305, 300]). Multiple references
to her blackness also racialize this monstrousness. Although the blackness is
literally her mourning clothes, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the
repeated characterizations of her as being “so big and so black” (as opposed
to Simone’s paleness), as well as a “savage” embodiment of “primitive ele-
mentary forces,” invoke racist tropes (305, 312). Motherhood represents a
dangerous and abject state of alterity.
12 In these stories, the figure of the Harlequin appears as Mr. Harley Quin,
who aids Mr. Satterthwaite in uncovering solutions to murders and
other mysteries. Cook interprets Quin as a ghost; Quin represents himself
as an immortal. However one classifies him, Harlequin’s appearances link
Satterthwaite’s femininity to supernatural insight.
13 Knox also cleanly divides detective fiction from fantastic fiction with the
commandment that “[a]ll supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled
out as a matter of course” (189).
14 As Alison Light puts it, “Poirot was part of that quest for a bearable mas-
culinity which could make what had previously seemed even effeminate
preferable to the bulldog virtues of 1914” (73). See also Rowland, who
discusses the feminine aspects of Poirot and Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter
Wimsey.
15 While Christie disavowed feminism in her autobiography, Makinen writes
that to take Christie at her word is to “unrealistically [read] opinions held
in her seventies as being synonymous with views held in her twenties and
thirties—an untenable position and one which a close examination of the
stories of the time will challenge” (7).
48 Julia Panko
16 I have engaged closely with Christie’s language in this chapter in part to
counter the assumption that her work is too formulaic to reward close read-
ing attention. In “Wireless,” as elsewhere, Christie demonstrates a much
higher degree of nuance and deliberation in her deployment of textual detail
than is often recognized.
17 Willis argues that authors of detective fiction are akin to mediums: “a skilled
author can manipulate the reader in the same way that [a medium’s] man-
ager would manipulate the medium’s audience, playing on their preconcep-
tions and expectations” (70). In the case of “Wireless,” the reader is also
positioned like a medium: unlike Dr. Meynell, Charles, or Mary, the reader
sees the entire truth.

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Ascari, Maurizio. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Gothic,
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Carpenter, Lynette and Wendy K. Kolmar. Ghost Stories by British and
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———. “The Coming of Mr. Quin.” 1924. The Mysterious Mr. Quin. 1930,
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———. “The Face of Helen.” 1927. The Mysterious Mr. Quin. 1930, Berkley
Books, 1984, pp. 133–150.
———. “The Last Séance.” 1926. The Hound of Death. 1933, Harper Collins,
2003, pp. 289–313.
———. The Man in the Brown Suit. 1924. Berkley Books, 1984.
———. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Grosset and Dunlap, 1926.
———. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. 1920. Bantam Books, 1983.
———. “The Tuesday Night Club.” 1927. The Thirteen Problems. 1928, Dodd,
Mead, and Company, 1973, pp. 7–20.
———. “Wireless.” 1926. The Hound of Death. 1933, Harper Collins, 2003,
pp. 137–160.
———. “The World’s End.” 1927. The Mysterious Mr. Quin. 1930, Berkley
Books, 1984, pp. 95–114.
Cook, Michael. Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story: The Haunted Text.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Ennis, Earl. “The Conscience Shop.” Radio, vol. 4, no. 9, September 1922,
pp. 21, 56–80. Google Books.
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New Media Cultures, vol. 14, 2016.
Galvan, Jill. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and
Communication Technologies, 1859–1919. Cornell UP, 2010.
 Uncanny Mediums 49
Hand, Richard J. “The Darkest Nightmares Imaginable: Gothic Audio Drama
from Radio to the Internet.” A Companion to American Gothic, edited by
Charles L. Crow, 2nd edition, Wiley Blackwell, 2013, pp. 463–474.
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October 1922, pp. 100–107. HathiTrust.
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1958.
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Between the Wars. Routledge, 1991.
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Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers
in Detective and Crime Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to
Television. Duke U P, 2000.
Willis, Chris. “Making the Dead Speak: Spiritualism and Detective Fiction.”
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Robert Vilain, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, pp. 60–74.
4 Buyer Beware
Haunted Objects in the
Supernatural Tales of
Margery Lawrence
Melissa Edmundson

In a career spanning more than forty years, Margery Lawrence (1889–

1969) published best-selling novels and supernatural fiction that frequently
highlighted an often-troubled past and its effect on the living. During the
1920s—her first decade as a professional author—Lawrence published
numerous supernatural stories in popular literary magazines, eventually
turning many of these pieces into the collections Nights of the Round
Table (1926), its sequel The Terraces of Night (1932), and The Floating
Café (1936). Yet despite the contemporary critical and commercial suc-
cess of the three collections, Margery Lawrence is all but forgotten among
scholars of the supernatural. Along with her contemporaries Elizabeth
Bowen, Violet Hunt, May Sinclair, and Eleanor Scott, Lawrence produced
some of the most socially conscious supernatural fiction of the early twen-
tieth century. Her lifelong belief in spiritualism and the occult channeled
itself into narratives that examine the inner workings of the mind and the
violent impulses that lurk just beneath otherwise calm and “normal” hu-
man exteriors.1
In particular, these themes can be seen in Lawrence’s frequent use of
haunted or cursed objects. These objects, which are initially described as
one-of-a-kind antiques, enter into otherwise peaceful British homes and
subsequently wreak physical and emotional havoc on the people who
come to own them. This chapter examines three supernatural stories
that trace Margery Lawrence’s use of haunted objects. “The Haunted
Saucepan,” first published in The Tatler on 1 December 1922 (and later
published as “The Engineer’s Story” in Nights of the Round Table), de-
scribes the evil influence of a murderess who continues to inhabit an
otherwise comfortable apartment in central London. In this story, the
traditionally feminine space of the kitchen becomes a nightmare for its
unsuspecting male occupant. The invasion of the supernatural through
the possession of a cursed object resurfaces in “The Crystal Snuff-box,”
originally published as “The Mystery of the Crystal Snuff-box” in
Nash’s Pall Mall in June 1929 (and later included as “The Antiquarian’s
Tale” in The Terraces of Night). Like the homicidal femme fatale of
“The Haunted Saucepan,” the story concerns the return of a vengeful,
sexually predatory witch who battles a modern English heroine over the
 Buyer Beware 51
soul of the latter’s fiancé. In a similar vein, “The Mask of Sacrifice,”
originally published as “The Mask” in the 30 November 1923 issue of
The Tatler (and later included in The Floating Café), also concerns the
unraveling of a newly married couple’s relationship in the presence of
a cursed Indian sacrificial mask that had been recently purchased and
brought into the couple’s home. “The Mask of Sacrifice” adds an ele-
ment of imperial critique as it subtly interrogates Britain’s connection to
empire and how the foreign object infiltrates the perceived safe space of
the British home. 2
Taken together, the haunted objects in these stories represent not
only a troubling of the present by the past, but also the extent to which
these supernatural objects—and the effect they have on their respective
owners—highlight very real contemporary social concerns about gender
dynamics between men and women, their proper roles within a modern
British society, and the perceived threat of predatory female sexuality. In
each of these stories, the invasion of the supernatural calls into question
the safe space of the English home, as well as the emotional strength of
the people who inhabit these respective homes. This spectral invasion
also takes the form of a symbolic invasion of empire that threatens the
stability of house and inhabitant. These stories, set within the intimate
space of a bourgeois London flat, are indeed focused on the interior—the
private residence and the individual mind—but their anxieties frequently
extend beyond the interior into exterior, wider social concerns of gender,
sexuality, and empire. In other words, the inner inevitably influences, or
even possesses, the outer and vice versa.
The modern world captured in Margery Lawrence’s supernatural
stories is also one concerned with the relationship between the interior
and exterior. For Catherine Spooner, the “development of Gothic in the
twentieth century […] is bound up with an interrogation of the crucial
elements of revenant history and claustrophobic space that have always
been defining features of Gothic” (45). Connected to this preoccupa-
tion with confining space and the inner workings of the mind, there
was “a modernist understanding of Gothic as interior drama rather than
dramatic spectacle” (Spooner 39). Yet authors tended to differ in what
precise kinds of “spectacle” they highlighted in their fiction. Simon Hay
reads modern ghost stories as a form of “naturalist supernatural,” a
mode of writing that “turn[s] away from realism’s project of explaining
the social and historical networks of causation that make up society, and
instead explain[s] the psychological causes of individual actions” (92).
Lawrence’s supernatural fiction of the 1920s represents a bridge from
the traditional Gothic stories of the nineteenth century to the more mod-
ern tales of horror and the supernatural that emerged later in the twenti-
eth century. As Catherine Spooner notes, citing Virginia Woolf’s famous
declaration, “It is at the ghosts within that we shudder,” the terms of the
modern Gothic in the new century had to be “renegotiated” (39). Part of
52 Melissa Edmundson
this renegotiation of how one views the supernatural is a (quite natural)
reaction to the massive historical changes of the period. These stories thus
become representative of a search for greater meaning in an increasingly
disordered postwar world. Perhaps it is no coincidence then that Lawrence
frequently chose younger, middle-class men as protagonists in her fiction
of the 1920s. In each of the stories discussed in this chapter, the psyches
of these men are challenged, but normalcy is restored at the end of each
narrative, as if Lawrence herself was subconsciously working through the
trauma of the postwar years. Simon Hay discusses how the modern Brit-
ish ghost story represents a troubled connection with the past and “holds
to a model of history as traumatically rather than nostalgically available
to us” (15). This idea is especially true if we consider the stories written in
1920s Britain. The young men who battle the evil spirits in these haunted
objects are ultimately saved from death, even though a­ fter their escape
from these “battles,” they remain haunted on some level.
According to Janice Rossen, there was a tendency to separate the su-
pernatural and the social in the works of twentieth-century women writ-
ers who were contemporaries of Margery Lawrence. Rossen argues that
modernist authors such as Dorothy Sayers and Elizabeth Bowen do not
typically combine their treatments of the Gothic with concerns about
gender because “logic and perception” interest them more. Yet, their
use of the supernatural implies their characters “are contending with
something beyond themselves. They face an enemy with superior pow-
ers, which gives the reader a requisite frisson of terror, and also provides
the characters with arresting challenges” (Rossen 39). Like Spooner,
Rossen stresses that modernist writers frequently privilege rationality,
as the thinking mind becomes as important as feeling (53). She writes,

The supernatural provides a code for emotional dilemmas which

can then be expressed in it. The thing which is much more destruc-
tive […] is the disintegration of the mind and of logic itself. That way
madness lies, and it is far more threatening than any ghost.
(Rossen 57)

The importance of psychological terror, or “cosmic fear,” is integral to

H.P. Lovecraft’s definition of the weird tale in 1927:

A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of

outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint,
expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its sub-
ject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign
and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature
which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the
daemons of unplumbed space.
(15)
 Buyer Beware 53
Along with more well-known writers such as Lovecraft, M.R. James,
and Arthur Machen, Margery Lawrence specialized in just this sort of
weird tale, as her protagonists often wrestle with unseen evil forces that
are made more terrible by the imaginings of the individual mind and the
fear that arises along with the supernatural entity.
Yet the extent to which cursed objects impact the minds and actions
of protagonists, resulting in a violence that in turn affects the people
near those haunted by these objects, is another layer that often occurs
in supernatural literature but remains less examined in studies of the
supernatural. In “The Malice of Inanimate Objects” (1933), M.R. James
comments directly on this phenomenon of the seemingly lifeless, every-
day object taking on a force all its own:

In the lives of all of us, short or long, there have been days, dreadful
days, on which we have had to acknowledge with gloomy resigna-
tion that our world has turned against us. I do not mean the human
world of our relations and friends […] No, it is the world of things
that do not speak or work or hold congresses and conferences.
(29)

It is to this “world of things” that Margery Lawrence frequently re-

turns in her supernatural fiction. In this way, she is a direct—but often
overlooked—successor of the antiquarian tale begun by M.R. James at
the turn of the twentieth century. Jack Sullivan has commented on the
troubled relationship with the new and old in James’s fiction, noting that
evil is almost always equated with the old and “something which should
have died” (81). But for Sullivan, the ghosts in these stories “materialize
not so much from inner darkness or outer conspiracies as from a kind
of antiquarian malaise” (90). More recently, Simon Hay has claimed
that the destruction of haunted objects in the work of James represents
“a return to the safety of the status quo” as “the past [is] not saved for
the future but once again [is] returned to unknowability” (101). Luke
Thurston has likewise discussed how James’s haunted objects exist as an
intruder within the text, something that is “outside the very space-time
of narrative itself” (103). Opposed to the modern, these objects represent
a disorder in the protagonist’s “psychical space” as “a sensory ‘discour-
tesy’ encrypted in the ancient object thrusts itself into the mental topog-
raphy of the ‘I’” (Thurston 103).3 Though Margery Lawrence benefits
from the tradition of haunted objects found in M.R. James’s fiction, I ar-
gue that the involvement with sociocultural tensions that is often lacking
in James’s supernatural tales becomes more fully realized in Lawrence’s
work. The cursed objects in her stories take on even more sinister mean-
ings as they become vehicles to express broader social concerns that are
represented in the trauma each object carries. Lawrence also heightens
the fear in these stories because the haunted objects (and the malevolent
54 Melissa Edmundson
forces within them) are willingly “invited” into the perceived safe space
of the domestic home. Rather than simply representing an unexplained
evil force or a history that is best left alone, the haunted object as an-
tique commodity—something that was created long ago and continually
resurfaces in various furnished apartments or curiosity shops—is like
a revenant that keeps coming back along with the social tensions and
psychic disruptions its presence uncovers.
In “The Haunted Saucepan,” one of Lawrence’s earliest stories, female
rage is supernaturally transferred to the most mundane symbol of wom-
en’s domestic life: the kitchen saucepan. The story’s narrator, Connor,
moves into the fully furnished apartment in St. James not knowing any-
thing about the female owner, a “true lover of luxury” who “was staying
abroad indefinitely” after poisoning her husband and several lovers for
their money by using the saucepan to cook arsenic-laced food (189, 187).
The trouble thus centers on the kitchen, and the small enamel saucepan
becomes “the ‘germ’ of the haunting” (208). When Connor first sees
the kitchen, he describes the gleam of all the pots and pans as “quite a
pretty effect,” except for the saucepan sitting on the stove (189). After
both Connor and his valet Strutt become mysteriously ill, the former be-
gins to suspect the saucepan, which he says seems to tilt its lid to look at
him and which boils in the empty kitchen with “a sort of quiet menace”
(194). Lawrence structures the story to build on this tension of the cat
and mouse game played between the increasingly frightened narrator—
who refuses to admit any supernatural occurrence—and the force rep-
resented within the saucepan. In addition to “looking” at him, the pan
also seems to sing as it boils, as Connor says, “the noise of the bubbling
shaped itself into a devilish little song, almost as if the thing was singing
to itself, secretly and abominably…chortling to itself in a disgusting sort
of hidden way” (195). Later, the saucepan is described in equally human
terms as having “a note of meditation in it […] as if the soul behind that
hateful little purring noise was pleased, and sat grinning to itself, plan-
ning new evil—a mocking, threatening little note” (203). In the woman’s
absence, the saucepan recreates her deadly ritual and subverts the usual
peaceful, welcoming domesticity of the feminine kitchen space. Connor
says of the boiling saucepan, “The actual homeliness of it seeming to
hide a sort of sinister meaning—and the purr of a boiling kettle is such
a jolly thing as a rule” (200). The feminine qualities of the kitchen and
the presence of the saucepan represent an outwardly welcoming but in-
wardly deadly space that entices the men into the room; the door to the
kitchen continues to be mysteriously open after being deliberately shut
on several occasions as the supernatural presence dares them to enter
what should be an inviting space.
The haunted object in the story also allows Lawrence to subvert
the idea of a woman as a helpless sexual object. According to J­ ennifer
Hedgecock, the femme fatale “transgresses social boundaries and
 Buyer Beware 55
overtly—even mockingly—rebels against conformist attitudes” (1). The
fatal woman in “The Haunted Saucepan” is an important instance of
these rebellions and subversions. She turns herself into a sexual object
in order to trap the men she kills, but she controls her own actions
and has no interest in any male-defined concept of morality. Within
the kitchen, a space long associated with women’s domestic drudgery
and servitude to men, the woman turns an object of domesticity into an
object of female power and control. This control extends itself as a su-
pernatural presence within the apartment long after the woman leaves.
When Connor and his friend Trevanion (who also brings a friend’s dog
as a “sensitive”) perform an experiment by waiting inside the kitchen at
midnight, they are met by a force that is at once female and other. The
supernatural presence that slowly walks down the hall into the kitchen
is described by Connor as “Something,” “the Thing,” “Whatever,” “the
Invisible,” and “the Horror” (202). Yet, at the same time, he cannot
deny the distinctly female qualities of the presence. He hears “a soft rus-
tle like a trailing skirt,” smells “a definite perfume,” and the dog stares
at something “about five feet from the floor” (202). It is this presence,
along with the menacing steam from the pan, that ultimately drives the
men from the room.
Although Connor orders the pan to be destroyed, the woman herself
is not destroyed. Described as “young, beautiful” and “hard as marble,”
she still lives somewhere and continues her deadly pursuit of riches (206).
Her crimes—and her mode of gaining freedom from what Hedgecock
calls the “dehumanizing burden” of domestic decency—are represented
in the pan but they are not contained there (19). The disembodied nature
of the haunting is also significant within the context of the story. Com-
menting on the work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century
writers, Glen Cavaliero has observed

An industrialized and commercially expansionist society found it-

self with an essentially materialistic spirituality, whose careful if
often plaintive separating of this world from its metaphysical roots,
when coupled with sexual self-repression and social and economic
guilt, caused discarnate spirituality to turn demonic.
(236)

This disconnect resulted in stories that “reflected the fragmentation of a

wider, deeper spiritual consciousness” (Cavaliero 236).
The despondency caused by the conflict between the old and the new is
also represented in the other dangerous woman in the story: Mrs. Barker,
the housekeeper who looks after the apartment in the woman’s absence
and who is hired as cook. She is initially described by Connor as a “most
ill-favoured looking old lady, with a chenille net, a thing I had thought
as dead as the Dodo, holding up her back hair” (188). Trevanion also
56 Melissa Edmundson
speaks of her in disrespectful terms, equating her presence with other
commodities in the apartment, asking Connor at dinner, “Where on
earth did you strike the cash to pay for this place, this feeding, and your
cordon bleu in the kitchen?” (193). Yet this “old hag”—a description in
keeping with the ominous deathly brew created in the bubbling sauce-
pan that doubles as a modern-day witch’s cauldron—still wields power
within the contemporary surroundings of the apartment (196). She with-
holds the information about the woman and her use of the saucepan to
poison men with arsenic and returns the pan to the kitchen after Strutt
throws it away, a reappearance that the men initially suspect to be super-
natural. This return further marks the object’s revenant-like qualities,
as anything cooked in it reproduces the symptoms of arsenic poisoning,
thus continuously bringing back illness and death. Much like her ­former
employer, Mrs. Barker’s actions are influenced by her need for self-­
preservation. Without other employment prospects, she is desperate to
keep her job as caretaker of the apartment, telling the men,

Yes … (defiantly) she ’ad used the thing on purpose once or twice!
She was a poor woman, and caretakin’ was a good job when you
got a post like this and no one to interfere; yes, she ’ad used it be-
fore to scare out tenants ’cos she wanted to stick to her job, and she
didn’t care.
(207)

The woman’s comments reflect the struggle of the working-classes to sur-

vive in the modern world and the anxiety that can lead people like her to do
desperate things. The socioeconomic desperation exhibited by Mrs. Barker
links her again with her former employer, a woman who most likely expe-
rienced similar economic hardships that led her to marry a rich old man
and then to commit the crimes that ensure her continued life of luxury.
Margery Lawrence returns to an examination of the lasting effects
of a woman’s dangerous charms in “The Crystal Snuff-box,” a story
which concerns the appearance of another femme fatale, the vengeful
spirit of Elizabeth Denning, who was burned as a witch in 1668. The
story is a fictional rendering of the kinds of ghosts Lawrence would later
describe in her spiritualist treatise Ferry over Jordan (1944) as “earth-
bound spirits who are held to the place they knew best on earth either
by strong vibrations of greed or hate or distress” (138). Elizabeth’s need
for revenge mirrors the woman in “The Haunted Saucepan,” yet in-
stead of trying to kill her male victims, Elizabeth uses her witchcraft
in an attempt to possess the soul of an unsuspecting young man. The
story opens with the young and affluent Peter Wilbrough, a “young man
about town” who “did not always avoid temptation with the strength of
mind that he should, having a pretty taste in antiques, and an excellent
income” (5). Wilbrough spots the snuff-box in the window of a dark
 Buyer Beware 57
little antique shop. The box is decorated with embroidery on satin, onto
which is sown the phrase “Beauty draws us by a single haire” (5). After
his fiancée Isabel Dillingham rejects the box as a gift, Peter takes the
object back to his apartment and subsequently begins to have dreams of
a dark-haired woman. Although he admits to Isabel that this recurring
dream troubles him, he chooses to keep from her the fact that he is mys-
teriously drawn to the woman. Lawrence describes this as a specifically
feminine fear which intrigues him:

that frightened feeling had been accompanied by an odd, breathless

fascination that made him long to turn and look at the fear that was
pursuing him—a fear feminine in form […] tall and dark, but veiled;
surrounded with a dark cloud of some sort through which great eyes
gleamed, ever fixed on his.
(8)

Through these dreams, the woman increasingly draws Peter to her, spir-
itually and physically, and he begins to see the physical manifestation of
the woman in his apartment, dressed in a yellow satin gown and touch-
ing the snuff-box.
Along with the increasingly pronounced manifestation of the spectral
woman, Isabel also becomes more assertive and important within the
narrative. Although the spectral presence of the woman in Peter’s apart-
ment causes people to assume that he is cheating on his fiancée, Isabel
refuses to give in to the rumors and decides that Peter’s strange behavior
was something “more disquieting than any ordinary affaire” (12). The
spiritual battle thus becomes one between the old and the new, signified
in the seventeenth-century and twentieth-century Englishwomen. And
within this battle, Lawrence subverts the traditional female role of vic-
tim. Both women lay claim to their male object of desire who remains
helpless and in danger throughout much of the story. Like Connor’s
friend Trevanion in “The Haunted Saucepan,” whose time in India al-
lows him to appreciate and acknowledge the possibility of otherworldly
forces, it is Isabel’s knowledge and acceptance of both new, modern
modes of thought, along with older, superstitious belief in the unknown
that ultimately makes her the heroine of the story. She recognizes that
Peter must be saved, thinking to herself, “Something from the Outer
Spaces, some sinister, ruthless Thing that once wore feminine flesh, had
come near and touched Peter” (13). She then reasons that

unless something could be done, sooner or later this Woman who

had come to woo him, to possess and vanquish him utterly and com-
pletely, would win—and presumably retreat, triumphant, whence
she came with her prey; the soul, the very inner man himself.
(13)
58 Melissa Edmundson
Yet, Isabel does not cower, but instead rises to the challenge in a thor-
oughly modern way:

For by now the girl had long relinquished any idea that her rival was
any flesh-and-blood woman who could be faced and fought […] Af-
ter a moment’s indecision the girl ran out of the room, and in a few
moments, huddled in a fur coat, was pushing home the self-starter
of the smart little blue Buick that had been Peter’s first present to her
after the announcing of their engagement.
(13)

Her mission is made even more important after she talks to Peter’s valet,
who tells her that she is the only thing standing in Elizabeth’s way, “I can’t
do nothing. I’m—outside. It’s you that’s the one thing She can’t kill—yet!
Mr. Peter’s just hanging on to you. If she can once get past you, she’ll get
’im, for good and all” (15). This suggests that the fight must be between
the two women, and Isabel’s ability to combine the modern (complete
with a fur coat and a “smart little Buick”) with the old ways is the one
thing that sets her apart and gives her the advantage over the witch.
Isabel goes on the offensive when she enters Peter’s apartment and
issues a direct challenge to the spirit in the snuff-box, saying, “I’m going
to stick to him. If he goes absolutely mad I shall stick and stick….Now,
what are you going to do?” (16). Her challenge results in Elizabeth man-
ifesting in the room and attempting to strangle Isabel, who manages to
destroy the box before she suffocates. After the box is smashed, the spell
is lifted from Peter and the couple find a piece of paper that had been
hidden between the crystal lid and the satin lining:

Within this Boxe I have hid, knoweing More than my Neighboures

of hidden Things, a Secret Waye back from the Dethe to wych I
goe. Many I won to mee by the darke gloary of my Haire, and to
my maister’s service, for wych hee has enspelled my Haire so that it
shall still serve mee.
(18–19, emphasis added)

The italicized words above draw attention to the connection between

the older spirit of Elizabeth and the young, modern Isabel. Each woman
possesses an intuitive knowledge of “hidden things,” though Isabel uses
her belief in the supernatural to save Peter, whereas Elizabeth seeks to
destroy him.
Through the snuff-box which leads to the manifestation of the mys-
terious woman, Lawrence again draws on the femme fatale tradition
that she utilized in “The Haunted Saucepan.” Though the objects that
hold their power and their rage are ultimately destroyed in both stories,
the defiant attitudes of these women mark them as important modern
 Buyer Beware 59
instances within the femme fatale tradition that extends back to the
nineteenth century. Rebecca Stott notes that these rebellious women
“are figures who celebrate their Otherness, their sexual difference, rather
than challenge it” (200). Lawrence also offers her readers an alternative
to this destructive female presence, yet one which remains nonetheless
powerful: the surprisingly strong and determined modern girl, Isabel.
The near victory of the femme fatale is symbolized in the small white
scar that appears around Isabel’s neck after she is almost strangled by a
strand of Elizabeth’s hair. The feminine allure of the long, black hair that
trapped so many men is finally broken, but only by another woman who
can resist such charms. The femme fatale is thus defeated by the modern
heroine, a woman who credits the existence of a supernatural presence
and who combats that presence with a modern sensibility and feminine
willpower. Instead of relying on a dangerous beauty whose continuing
power comes from a male source of influence—the “master” that gives
Elizabeth her strength as a witch—Isabel’s strength as a woman comes
from within, from her need to save the man she loves.
The fight to save a relationship amid an unknown supernatural men-
ace is a central concern in Lawrence’s “The Mask of Sacrifice,” which
examines the far-reaching dangers of empire through a cursed Indian
sacrificial mask whose presence threatens a young British couple’s life
and happiness. As with the haunted saucepan that seemingly casts devi-
ous looks at Connor, Lawrence foregrounds the sinister qualities of the
mask from the story’s beginning paragraphs, including the opening line
which begins, “It was a horrible thing” (174). The detailed description
of the face imbues it with human-like qualities:

One wisp of course black hair hung straight each side of the long
thin face, dull yellow-brown in colour and creased with a thousand
lines and wrinkles; huge gilt rings swung from the hidden ears, and
the thin-lipped mouth was bitterly sardonic.
(174)

Jack Trelawney brings the item home “in triumph” from an “old curi-
osity shop near the Strand” but admits to his new bride, Maisie, that he
knows nothing about its provenance (174). Jack is pleased that he got
it “absurdly cheap” though he figures it is worth more and is possibly
“stolen goods,” a comment that runs deeper than Jack acknowledges,
as the relic becomes symbolic of a much larger practice of British impe-
rial theft of land and material goods from colonized nations (174, 175).
­Lawrence also focuses on the extent to which the mask is out of place in
the otherwise English room:

It was a charming room, cosy and well furnished, lined with books,
an antlered head or two over the door and fireplace, heavy velvet
60 Melissa Edmundson
curtains shutting out the cold wind that whistled outside, and a
thick Persian carpet, wonderfully coloured, on the polished floor. A
regular man’s room, the room of a well-bred Englishman of rather
bookish tastes, the only incongruous note struck by the mask that
now rested on the table.
(175)

This description is telling in several ways. The room is obviously an

upper-middle-class, masculine space. It is sheltered from the cold and
seemingly any other unpleasantness that might attempt to intrude upon
the happy home of the Trelawneys. However, the mask and its subse-
quent “horror” are brought into the home, invited in by Jack. The room
also has other hints of empire as the antlered heads and Persian carpet
signal a man in control of his world, a quintessential Englishman who
hunts and procures the best imperial goods in order to furnish his pri-
vate, domestic realm. Readers later learn that this is only the latest in a
series of colonial relics collected by Jack. The drawing room is “stacked
with curious and beautiful things, mostly Oriental, from Trelawney’s
many wanderings” (176). When an old friend, the English Army offi-
cer Miles, visits the couple and inquires about the mask, which he, like
Maisie, initially describes as a “horror,” we learn that Jack frequently
buys colonial antiques at the Strand shop, including an Algerian knife
and Chinese coffee cups (176–77).
The precise nature of the mask’s curse on its various owners becomes
apparent when the Trelawneys read in the newspaper that the antique
shop owner has brutally killed his wife by “a dozen knife-thrusts from
an old Moorish dagger” immediately before Jack purchased the mask
(177). Neighbors of the shop owner reported hearing the couple arguing;
this behavior transfers itself to the home of Jack and Maisie, stimulated
by the presence of the mask that watches over the couple with what
appears to be a “fleeting and cruel” smile (174). Believing that Maisie is
having an affair with Miles, Jack retreats from his modern sensibilities
and becomes untrusting and possessive. When he forbids Maisie to kiss
Miles, she replies that it is “rather late in the day to try and come the
early Victorian husband” with her (179). This hints at underlying issues
of control and sexual double standards that are seemingly latent in the
couple and brought out by the presence of the mask.
The struggle between Jack and the mask’s influence becomes more
personal in the latter half of the story, as Lawrence clearly sets up the
Englishman-against-Empire scenario within the microcosm of a cozy
and otherwise safe, upscale London apartment. Jack talks directly to the
object, half-heartedly jesting, “Anyway, you old brute, I suppose one of
those psychic asses would get a fine yarn out of your ‘thirst for blood’
still fulfilling itself” (183). Yet Jack increasingly falls under the mask’s
spell and is powerless to stop its influence over him. As he stands before
 Buyer Beware 61
it, “his very soul seemed to be sinking, disappearing into some wild,
dark vortex wherein sanity, decency, all that made him a man must in-
evitably drown and vanish” (183). The more traditional colonial threat
of degeneration and “going native” in foreign lands is transferred to the
English domestic scene. The mask’s gaze infects Jack with “a sort of
spiritual miasma, a dark, slow flood of mental poison that was slowly
but with ghastly sureness sucking down, drowning, extinguishing, all
that went to make a sane and well-balanced man” (183).
In addition to the perceived degrading influence of empire, the foun-
dation of the “clean, healthy Englishman” reaches its breaking point as
Jack undergoes a dreaded loss of sanity and control (183). In a trance
state, he sees “a crude altar” surrounded by “a shadowy throng of hor-
rible shapes” (184). He then witnesses a human sacrifice led by someone
wearing the mask. Yet this image also symbolizes the primeval, sexual
energy that Jack attempts to keep hidden behind the exterior of a re-
spectable Englishman, someone who delights in displaying the relics of
empire but who refuses to acknowledge their true purpose and history.
The “mad dancing whirl” that follows the “blood-worship” leads to a
“dread orgy” of “naked, screaming, and horribly glad” bodies where
“man forgot he was man and made in the image of God, and returned
to his primeval filth! The drums throbbed whimpering throughout the
quiet room, the distant voices screamed, hysterical, abandoned” (184).
As Jack awakes from this vision “livid” and “shaking,” he witnesses
another sort of abandonment in the next room where Maisie seduces
Miles and the two engage in “a wildly passionate kiss” (184, 185). At
this moment, Jack lets out a diabolical laugh that is seemingly echoed by
the mask itself. Just as with the shopkeeper, this object of the imperial
trade takes revenge on its owner. Jack’s transformation from a sedate,
respectable Englishman to a jealous maniac intent on revenge is the lit-
eral rendering of how the British colonizer becomes monstrous through
his connection to the barbarities of imperialism. Simon Hay notices that
“the social totality that structures the world of the ghost stories, the truth
underlying the mere experiences of the lives of characters and readers—
this social reality has included from the genre’s beginnings absolutely the
hard facts of empire” (11). For the characters in Lawrence’s story, their
seemingly safe, comfortable domestic world is inescapably bound to the
negative consequences of imperialism, and the presence of the mask, as
symbol of empire, demonstrates how tenuous the idea of “an English-
man’s home is his castle” really is. In this way, the object’s placement
within the home can be read as another type of reverse colonialization
because these colonial objects travel across the seas to London in order
to strike at the heart of British power. As Hay remarks, “The social re-
lationships that the ghost story addresses, as it tries to imagine solutions
for the social crises these relations increasingly find themselves confront-
ing throughout modernity, are insistently imperial ones” (11).
62 Melissa Edmundson
As Jack attempts to shoot Miles and the two men fight, the mask is
destroyed and each person seemingly wakes up from its influence. Miles,
“for once shedding his English dislike of admitting any belief in the su-
pernatural,” mentions that he saw a similar mask while serving in India
(187). He throws the pieces of the mask into the flames of the fireplace,
releasing one last force of latent “evil” into the room:

the ghastly blue of the dancing flames lit up their white faces with
an awful radiance, livid and terrible. The roar of the wind and the
flames together seemed to soar and scream as if something in fren-
zied, impotent rage shook an invisible fist at them, shrieking fury
and baffled evil as it fled—then in a flash, it passed, as the blue flame
disappeared up the chimney, and through the windows came peep-
ing in the light of the fresh and wholesome dawn.
(187)

Glen Cavaliero has described the supernatural as “a rogue element in the

house of fiction” that “function[s] as a shatterer of idols”; he continues
by saying that the supernatural “assaults the tendency to confine the
reading of experience within any one given philosophy or framework;
it qualifies established orthodoxies; it can be both critical and correc-
tive” (238). What Cavaliero calls the “tale of terror” likewise “aims to
destabilize social as well as personal assumptions, to invite a reordering
of expectations” (238). This reading of supernatural fiction gains even
more significance when applied to how haunted imperialism functions in
Lawrence’s story through the instability brought about by the presence
of the Indian mask. After bringing the mask (the empire in microcosm)
into the home, Jack and Maisie must deal with the consequences of their
own actions, as the realities of Jack’s jealousy and violence and Maisie’s
sexual attraction to Miles cause a dark cloud of narrative uncertainty to
linger over the “fresh and wholesome dawn” (187).
Simon Hay has stated that

The modernity on display in the ghost story has not successfully dis-
tinguished itself from its past; indeed, the whole point of the ghost
story is that the present cannot wrench free of the past and so has
not become fully modern.
(15)

By setting her supernatural stories in a modern world of fast cars and

fashionable London flats, complete with all the latest luxuries and
technology, along with her equally modern, young, well-to-do pro-
tagonists, Margery Lawrence brings this figurative conflict between
past and present into sharp relief. The haunted objects in her sto-
ries are indeed both aesthetically and temporally out of place in these
 Buyer Beware 63
otherwise modern surroundings. When the vengeful spirits within
these objects emerge, they bring with them a disruption that threatens
the very foundations of the bourgeois comforts that are such a part of
these stories. In order to defeat these malevolent forces, each character
must also accept an older, more traditional and superstitious mode of
thinking.
Yet, after these spiritual battles are over, as with Isabel Dillingham’s
scar, there remains something marked on the psyches of these charac-
ters that cannot be completely erased or forgotten. Their encounters
with the past highlight a social uneasiness that refuses to be destroyed
with the objects. Whether it is the predatory female sexual nature that
is unleashed by the haunted saucepan and the crystal snuff-box, or the
imperial rage that resides within the Indian sacrificial mask, a part of
the negative supernatural energy that represents these lingering social
tensions remains to disrupt the seemingly neat narrative closure at the
end of each story. The objects may be destroyed, lives and relationships
may be saved, but the trappings of gender, empire, and commodity cul-
ture will be encountered again. As Lawrence suggests, London is a vast
metropolis, full of wealthy young Britons with money to spare, and there
are many more curiosity shops with haunted objects just waiting for
their next owners. Through these objects, a traumatic past comes back,
but this return is made all the scarier because it accentuates the fragility
of the modern world.

Notes
1 Lawrence returned to the theme of spiritualism and the afterlife in several
subsequent works, including Ferry over Jordan (1944) and What is This
Spiritualism? (1946), as well as the novels The Bridge of Wonder (1939),
The Rent in the Veil (1951), The Tomorrow of Yesterday (1966), and A Res-
idence Afresh (1969).
2 The threat of foreign invasion as a consequence of Britain’s colonial expan-
sion was a recurring motif in Gothic literature during the second half of the
nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone
(1868), H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and
Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) each deal with the threat of reverse col-
onization. Within the supernatural short fiction tradition, notable works
about harmful objects connected to empire that invade British spaces include
W.W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902) and Algernon ­Blackwood’s
“The Doll” (1946). For critical perspectives on this tradition, see Pat-
rick Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,
1830–1914 (1988), H.L. Malchow’s Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-
Century Britain (1996), Andrew Smith and William Hughes’s Empire and
the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (2002), and Roger Luckhurst’s The Mum-
my’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy (2012).
3 For an extended discussion of James’s relationship to modernism, see
Chapter 8, “M.R. James’s Gothic Revival” in Andrew Smith’s The Ghost
Story, 1840–1920: A Cultural History (2010).
64 Melissa Edmundson
Works Cited
Cavaliero, Glen. The Supernatural and English Fiction. Oxford UP, 1995.
Hay, Simon. A History of the Modern British Ghost Story. Palgrave Macmillan,
2011.
Hedgecock, Jennifer. The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature: The Danger
and the Sexual Threat. Cambria Press, 2008.
James, Montague Rhodes. “The Malice of Inanimate Objects,” The Masquer-
ade. June 1933, pp. 29–32.
Lawrence, Margery. “The Crystal Snuff-box.” The Terraces of Night. 1932.
Ash-Tree Press, 1999, pp. 5–19.
———. Ferry over Jordan. Robert Hale, 1944.
———. “The Haunted Saucepan.” Nights of the Round Table. 1926. Ash-Tree
Press, 1998, pp. 187–208.
———. “The Mask of Sacrifice.” The Floating Café. 1936. Ash-Tree Press,
2001, pp. 174–187.
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. Supernatural Horror in Literature. 1927. Dover,
1973.
Rossen, Janice. Women Writing Modern Fiction: A Passion for Ideas. Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003.
Spooner, Catherine. “Gothic in the Twentieth Century.” Routledge Companion
to the Gothic, edited by Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, Routledge,
2007, pp. 38–47.
Stott, Rebecca. The Fabrication of the Late Victorian Femme Fatale: The Kiss
of Death. Macmillan, 1992.
Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to
Blackwood. Ohio UP, 1978.
Thurston, Luke. “Inhospitable Objects in M.R. James.” Literary Bric-à-Brac
and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities, edited by Jonathon
Shears and Jen Harrison, Ashgate, 2013, pp. 99–114.
Section II

Profoundly and
Irresolvably Political
Fantastic Spaces
Luke Thurston

“The strangest characteristic of unconscious processes,” wrote Freud in

1911, “is due to their entire disregard of reality testing; they equate re-
ality of thought with external reality, and wishes with their fulfilment”
(225). For all of the challenges this equation of desire and reality might
entail for the everyday business of therapy―and one can almost hear the
exasperated sigh in Freud’s phrasing―it amounted in the end to one of
the fundamental discoveries of psychoanalysis. If the unconscious, like
some feckless adolescent, thus refused to submit to the sober discipline
of grown-up “reality testing,” it was just such misbehavior, after all, that
had given rise to such literary wish-fulfillments as Wuthering Heights.
Fantasy might imprison human subjects, in other words, or it might
empower them, allowing them to overcome whatever restrictions and
obligations they were born into. Freud’s discovery spanned both possi-
bilities, and his work would explore them equally as it moved between
neurotic compulsions and the reality-defying artistry of a Leonardo.
Now, literary critics have tended to see the imaginary disregard of re-
ality testing in fantasy as a more creative faculty than Freud sometimes
did. For Jacqueline Rose, the concept of fantasy is a precious critical
­resource, allowing us to open up our interpretations to the full creative
potential of the human subject: “to focus on fantasy in the life of a
writer,” she writes, “… is to pay tribute to what a mind―to what her
mind―is capable of” (55–56). And it is above all the creative power
of fantasy, its self-inventing and world-transforming potential, which is
highlighted by the three essays gathered in the “Fantastic Spaces” sec-
tion. Each explores how literary creation deploys fantasy as a way to
displace and disturb the ideological geometry of realism, producing sce-
narios that defy a patriarchal rationalism, which would impose its sterile
and constrictive version of “external reality.”
Crucially, the places and spaces recalibrated by the fantasmatic imag-
ination are always profoundly and irresolvably political. However, to
interpret the politics of fantasy without lapsing into some ahistorical
fantasy of our own, we should always approach each text as part of a
66 Luke Thurston
specific historical situation, one where writing fantasy can serve as an
intervention with political consequences. The essays in this section ex-
plore aspects of the cultural politics of fantasy in two strikingly different
decades: the decadent 1890s and the modernist 1920s. Anne Jamison’s
analysis of Somerville and Ross’s The Silver Fox considers a fantasy
scenario whose background is the fractured and contested landscape of
1890s Ireland, while the essays by Jean Mills and Céline Magot turn to
women’s literary fantasies during the heyday of artistic experimentalism
in the 1920s. To understand the shifting topography of literary fantasy
at stake in these essays, the way fantasmatic deformation and interroga-
tion of “real” space is inevitably part of wider cultural and theoretical
changes, we need to start by looking at some of the ways in which the
scope and sense of fantasy were wholly transformed between the end of
the Victorian era and the period after World War I.
The 1890s, it is widely argued by historians, saw the birth of mod-
ern psychology. In essence, the dominant scientific naturalism of the
­Victorian age, together with its Darwinian model of consistent “psycho-
physiology,” was challenged and rewritten in a few years by the likes of
Charcot, Bernheim, Ellis, James, and Freud. The very notion of an “in-
ner world” characterized by what Freud termed “psychical reality”―a
dimension not epistemologically verifiable but nonetheless posited as
real, not dismissed as delusory―arises in this decade, as does the idea of
diverse sexual orientations. The trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 opened a
shocking rip in the veil of Victorian repression, with transgressive sexu-
ality suddenly appearing in what had seemed the most refined and most
culturally elevated of spheres. Earlier in the decade, another Irishman
had been famously ruined by the intrusion of sex, as the glittering polit-
ical career of Charles Parnell was brutally ended due to his (supposed)
adultery. Both of these scandalous sexual misdemeanors find echoes in
the Somerville and Ross text read by Jamison, with its furtive inscription
of same-sex desire and its motif of the fox recalling Parnell (who play-
fully signed his love letters “Mr. Fox”…).
The other hugely important feature of the 1890s in the context of
thinking about fantasy is the development of feminism through the
suffragist movement and the emergence of the “New Woman.” If the
empowerment of women could take place in literary narratives (and in
The Silver Fox, as Jamison shows, this is linked to horse-riding and
especially fox-hunting), this very “fantasy” can be seen as a politically
charged gesture, a way of challenging the conventional representation of
women as passive witnesses of heroic masculinity. The 1890s, in short,
was a transformative period for the politics of identity and gender, no-
where more so than in the violently fractured and contested landscape
of Ireland, as Jamison’s brilliant essay makes clear. In her insightful ex-
ploration of Somerville and Ross’s The Silver Fox, a complex picture
emerges of how in the work of these two Victorian women, writing from
 Profoundly and Irresolvably Political 67
and to an embattled Irish Protestant faction caught between antagonistic
historical forces, the very meaning of place, of the Irish landscape itself
as a supposedly consistent and natural reality, is caught up in the oscil-
lations and equivocations of desiring subjectivity. Jamison outlines the
logic of supernatural apparition in the story, whereby imperialist mo-
dernity in the form of an English railway engineer bent on obliterating
Irish tradition is punished by the ancestral spirit of the silver fox (with
echoes, surely, of that dangerous Irish modernizer “Mr. Fox” Parnell…),
before arguing that for Somerville and Ross the scenario is primarily a
device for the covert exploration of female subjectivity and indeed de-
sire. For if, from one point of view, the story shows modernity posing
a threat to Irish identity and its embodiment in the rural environment,
from another it correlates the modern with the empowering liberation of
Irish women, offering them a chance to become, like their counterparts
in London and Paris, “New Women” no longer defined by constrictive
patriarchal identities. Jamison’s meticulous close reading of the story
reveals it as a strange, wavering text, full of suggestions of unexpected
ambiguities and possibilities lurking behind the official surfaces of sex-
ual, personal, and cultural identity.
By the 1920s, when Hope Mirrlees and Elizabeth Bowen were writ-
ing, many of the struggles and conflicts of the fin de siècle had been
resolved or superseded. The overwhelming social impact of the war
had transformed the landscape of gender politics, and different sexu-
alities were acknowledged and silently tolerated by the culture if not
yet by the law. Freud’s work, having begun as a subversive challenge
to the dominant scientific paradigm, had become itself the dominant
account of human subjectivity, with its concept of sexuality as centered
on fantasy widely accepted. In this new climate, fantasy itself becomes
more personal, more linked to individual subjectivity and so less open to
easily-identifiable political deployment or interpretation. The work of
Mirrlees and Bowen illustrates this transformed site of fantasy in their
very different ways.
With Jean Mills’s essay, we move on to the heyday of modernist experi-
mentalism in the 1920s. While the fantasmatic utopia of Lud-in-the-Mist
offers a playful alternative reality to the real world, it cryptically inscribes
a vocabulary of queer subjectivity and desire with its “faerie fruit” and
magic spells. Reading Hope Mirrlees’s celebrated Lud-in-the-Mist as a
“menippean” satire, and thus as shot through with carnivalesque ribaldry
and obscenity, Mills argues that the novel opens a portal onto an alterna-
tive discursive and erotic world developed by Mirrlees and her lover Jane
Harrison, a world as skewed politically as it is imaginatively. In the satir-
ical counter-world invented by Mirrlees, argues Mills, queer subjectivity
can at last find itself at home and explore its own trajectory, where the
forbidden consumption of “faerie fruit” and the passage across “debate-
able hills” give allegorical shape to desires and fantasies forbidden and
68 Luke Thurston
silenced, consigned to oblivion or infantilized, by the “grown up” legisla-
tors of patriarchal “reality.” Space here is reinvented as no longer beholden
to and “tested” by any preexisting model of socially conditioned existence:
it is freed to map itself as a pure inscription of the erotic i­magination.
Mills’s essay pays eloquent tribute both to a woman’s passionate creativity
and to her fearless act of self-affirming desire.
Céline Magot turns to the apparently more familiar topic of domestic
space and its entrapment of women in her reading of Elizabeth B ­ owen’s
1923 ghost story “The Shadowy Third.” Bowen’s story is more ob-
viously oriented to feminist concerns than others in the section, with
its deployment of the supernatural subtly inscribing a feminine desire
insidiously haunting the reality inhabited by the complacently patriar-
chal Martin. Magot argues that the haunting of space in Bowen’s story
registers nothing less than an ontological disturbance, a subversion of
the very reality constructed and inhabited by patriarchy, with its com-
fortable economy regulating the exchange of women in accordance with
the desires of men. In “The Shadowy Third,” Magot concludes, writing
itself becomes an act of protest against the representational space of
domestic oppression. If the “strangest characteristic” of the unconscious
is its irresponsible defiance of the reality principle, women writing the
space of fantasy as a space of female power gives that characteristic of
the psyche its most creative and hopeful realization. If fantasy was no
longer in the modern world the domain of vengeful ancestral spirits, in
the work of these dissident women writers it could still carry the force of
a vitriolic challenge to patriarchal definitions of reality.

Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning”
(1911). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sig-
mund Freud, Volume XII (1911–1913). Translated by James Strachey et al.,
Hogarth Press, 1958, pp. 218–226.
Rose, Jaqueline. On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern
World. Princeton UP, 2003.
5 Female Desire, Colonial Ireland,
and the “limits of the possible”
in E. Œ. Somerville and Martin
Ross’s The Silver Fox
Anne Jamison

In her late-life collection of autobiographical essays, Happy Days (1946),

Irish author Edith Somerville asserts that in Ireland “there is still a vein
of primitive sorcery, and one can there meet with an acceptance of mar-
vels that has not yet faded away” (10). “Eire,” she claims, “has not yet
outgrown Fairies and Wise Women, and Wart-Charmers” (10). These
assertions about Ireland, however, are not configured within the usual
rhetoric of colonial superiority over assumed native Irish primitivism,
but rather framed as nostalgic laments for a lost “[s]ensitiveness” in the
powers of human perception (9). Despite Ireland’s continuing penchant
for the marvelous, Somerville regrets that “Evolution” and the corre-
sponding forces of “Civilization” have “deafened and dumbed us” so
that “we can no longer hear and respond to the secret voices that …
carry through forests and pass over deserts and rivers” (9). According to
the essay, this extra-sensory perception now only exists among animals
and oriental savages (Africans and Indians) and Somerville poses the
question of whether or not “our telephones and wireless” are any “com-
pensation” for this lost fifth sense (9).
It is on this preoccupation with, and ensuing opposition between,
modern technologies and “primitive sorcery” that this chapter will train
its thinking. In particular, my argument will suggest that this fascination
with the supernatural allows for a covert exploration of female friend-
ship and desire in Somerville’s co-authored fiction with her longstanding
writing partner and cousin, (Violet) Martin Ross. Julie Anne Stevens
has long recognized the two authors’ interest in the ghost story genre
and documented the “ghostly manifestations” that haunt Somerville and
Ross’s short fiction, as well as the “hints of supernatural forces” that the
duo’s fictive Irish landscapes are seen to conceal (“Flashlights” 145, 204).
Like Stevens, Roy Foster and Selina Guinness have further connected
these Gothic strains to a broader appetite among Irish Protestant Ascen-
dancy authors for the “rites of spiritualism” (“Flashlights” 142). This
attraction toward the occult, these critics argue, stems from both a con-
text of religious revival and the increasing social and political marginal-
ization of the Protestant landed classes in Ireland in the late nineteenth
70 Anne Jamison
and early twentieth centuries. Foster situates this kind of Gothic fiction
as part of the cultural and intellectual historical narrative of Ireland’s
embattled Protestant figure, and the predilections to the occult that such
figures exhibited. This pull toward spiritualist practice and supernatural
fiction, Foster argues, mirrors “a sense of displacement, a loss of social
and psychological integration, and an escapism motivated by the threat
of a takeover by the Catholic middle classes” (220).
This chapter extends these ideas by taking as its central focus
­Somerville and Ross’s fourth novel, The Silver Fox (1897), and exploring
the interconnection of the political and sexual dynamics at play within
its more fantastic elements. The Silver Fox is set amidst the political and
cultural tension between nineteenth-century English imperial ambition
(in the form of a railway engineering project in Ireland) and the private
and social traditions of the native Irish, including their superstitious be-
lief in the novel’s spectral title character, the silver fox. Both real and
unreal, hunter and hunted, the fox crosses over what the narrators call
“the limits of the possible” (53). The fox is seen to move with ease above
and below the Irish landscape, usually with hounds and horses in pur-
suit, literally travelling between the surface world of a very actualized
rural Irish terrain and an unknown netherworld beneath it made up of
numerous aqueous subterranean passages that burrow through the vast
tracts of Irish bog land. Engendering and enmeshed in the novel’s colo-
nial politics, this chapter will argue, are the text’s three female protago-
nists: the native Irish peasant, Maria Quin; Hugh French’s English wife,
Lady Susan French; and Hugh’s cousin, Slaney Morris. The actual and
supernatural movements of the fox both draw together and pull apart
these three women and this chapter will, finally, attempt to demonstrate
how these characters, like the fox, gesture toward a stretching out of the
conventional “limits of the possible” in terms of female solidarity and
sexuality in the nineteenth century.
The Gothic tensions of Somerville and Ross’s The Silver Fox are argu-
ably a continuation of a well-worn literary path that the two authors
commenced with their debut novel, An Irish Cousin, in 1889. It was in
response to Richard Bentley’s commercial agreement to publish this novel
that Ross jubilantly commanded her writing partner to “take” together
their home region of Carbery in County Cork, Ireland, and “grind its
bones to make our own bread” (Lewis 135). Buoyed by B ­ entley’s interest
in their novel, Somerville and Ross began to recognize the intellectual
and financial remuneration to be reaped from their hitherto amateur
interest in the stories, dialogue, and anecdotes of the local Irish popula-
tions of their home counties of Cork and Galway. Like An Irish Cousin,
the genesis of The Silver Fox lies in a familiar and yet often uncanny Irish
landscape. In their later novel, however, this landscape is marked by a
more determined political intent on the part of the a­ uthors and more ex-
plicitly bears the traces of British occupation and land colonization. The
 Female Desire, Colonial Ireland 71
origins of the novel also lie both in the Irish fairy folklore of Galway and
West Cork and in the tragic realities of Irish peasant life in the environs
of Ross House, the home of the Martin family.
It was in December 1893 that the “making of a story almost” be-
gan to surface in Ross’s mind after learning of the suicide by drowning
of a young boy in the local parish close to Ross House in the wooded
pools of Pouleen-a-Fairla. “Never was a more bitter comment on a par-
ish feud, and never was there a more innocent and godly life turned to
active insanity by bad treatment,” writes Ross to Somerville in January
1894: the event “fills my mind in its dramatic aspect mostly and perhaps
after a talk with you it might take shape” (Lewis 196, 199). Psycholog-
ically persecuted by what he believes to be the “bad luck” of the titular
creature, Tom Quin’s drowning in The Silver Fox borrows from Ross’s
transcription of events as related to her by a servant on the family estate,
Mat Kenneally (14). In this account there are already the hallmarks of
the novel’s politicized Gothic terrain: the intertwining of very real local
Irish politics, “a parish feud,” and the supernatural effects of the Irish
landscape that surrounded this event. “God knows tis quare weather,”
Mat tells Ross, “[t]he air’s like it’s be comin’ up out o’ the ground … it’s
the weather … that’s puttin’ the people asthray in their heads” (Ross,
Manuscript Notebook, n. pag.).
In the novel, this queerness in the air is triggered by the appearance
of the silver fox, which is released into the Irish landscape through the
destruction wreaked by the building of a new railway line by the English
industrial contractor, Wilfred Glasgow:

Mr. Glasgow wanted gravel for the new railway, and bought a bit
of a hillside from old Danny Quin at Cahirdreen. There was a big
patch of furze there, and the men said that when the first blast went
off a grey fox ran out of it and away into the hills; a sort of fox that
no one had ever seen before. They say that there is an old prophecy
about the bad luck that is to come when that hill is thrown into
Tully Lake, and that is just what is to be done where the line crosses
a corner of the lake. They believe that the fox is a witch or a fairy,
and that it will bring the bad luck.
(13–14)

Throughout the novel, and particularly by those characters that chance

to meet it face to face, the fox is repeatedly associated with the “cold lore
of unearthly things,” “the unknown and impossible,” and “the power
of unseen things”; according to the native Irish, it is a “grey and ill-
omened thing” (150, 70, 164, 165). Such characters further suffer “a
cold and prickling sensation,” or a “thrill” to the heart that dies away
“in a sickly chill,” at their encounter with the fox, firmly positioning
the animal as a creature that exceeds rational comprehension (70, 150).
72 Anne Jamison
Indeed, the first sighting of the fox in the novel appears not in reality
(the Irish landscape) but in Lady’s Susan’s “awful dream” at the start of
the book: “some ghastly thing … a whitey, silvery sort of thing, a kind
of Arctic fox … the horrid thing was smiling and showing all its teeth”
(15). Somerville records in one of her working notebooks a similarly
eerie creature that is reputed by local inhabitants to roam the woods
surrounding Somerville’s home town of Castletownshend, an animal “as
big as a greyhound, but like a cat” and with a bark “like the squeal of
a seagull” (Somerville, Manuscript Notebook, n. pag.). The fox is thus
rooted in the superstitious lore of the novel’s native Irish population, as
well as the landed Irish gentry’s susceptibility to this folkloric wisdom.
Despite its ghostly proportions, however, and like the supposed mon-
ster in the Castletownshend woods, the fox is also a very real animal that
Hugh, Slaney, Susan, and Wilfred Glasgow choose to hunt. Stevens has
argued that “[h]unting has everything to do with politics” in S­ omerville
and Ross’s later short fiction and this argument, I would contend, has
its origins as early as The Silver Fox (The Irish Scene 222). The novel
contains several lengthy and descriptive passages of hunting, enjoyed by
both the upper-class male and female characters in the book, but the
resistance to the hunt by the native Irish is reminiscent of the colonial
associations of hunting in Ireland. As Kathryn Kirkpatrick points out
in her study of animals in Irish literature, “the rise of fox-hunting as
a sport in Ireland was co-extensive with the colonization of Irish land
and culture under the Plantation system … its importation into Ireland
becomes an emblem of exclusive rights to land” (30–31). As the hunt in
the novel thus becomes a veritable symbol of might and right over the
Irish landscape, the major characters in the book are seen to exist along
a spectrum of sliding gender and political allegiances aligned with the
hunt and the politics that it represents.
Caught in-between the native Irish and the English, both racially and
politically, Slaney Morris, the text’s central female protagonist, partakes
in the hunt for the silver fox, but also sympathizes with the concerns of
the Irish, who refuse to assist the huntsmen and women on the grounds
that it will “dhraw down bad luck” if the fox “wouldn’t be let alone”
(47). Slaney believes “it isn’t much good to go against the country people
in these things” (54). Slaney’s sympathy in the novel is further seen to de-
rive from her possession of “another sense”; she “had seen and heard …
things not easily accounted for [and] she knew how often a superstition
is justified of its works” (54). Maria Quin, the beleaguered Irish peasant
who loses her father and brother in the novel to supernatural persecution,
acknowledges the “power of the unseen things that had worked together
to her brother’s undoing” (164). Moreover, she is full of “blind indigna-
tion” toward the “self-engrossed,” “brutal and desecrating” huntsmen
and women who, “for their own amusement, had wrecked the fortunes
of a family” (165). Both women are also, noticeably, associated with
 Female Desire, Colonial Ireland 73
foxes. Maria is several times in the novel introduced as “Tom Quin’s
red-haired sister” and the repeated references to her hair color recall the
opening passages of the novel and Lady Susan’s hair being “as red as
a fox” (62, 7). Unlike Lady Susan, who “got it done in Paris,” Maria’s
hair is a natural red and this is markedly set in contrast to Lady Susan’s
broader artificiality (7). Slaney, too, is drawn in alignment with the sil-
ver fox in particular. On disengaging from one of the hunts, Lady Susan
asks Glasgow, “What happened to Slaney Morris? … She vanished like
the fox. Is she a witch, too?” (79). Slaney’s shifting class and racial po-
sition and allegiances—her hybrid character—cause uncertainty in the
text and, like the fox, she breaks a variety of different boundaries, in-
cluding gender. Glasgow remarks that Slaney simply doesn’t fit into his
“cast-iron theories of women” (138).
This is all in contradistinction to Glasgow and Lady Susan, who are
seen to adopt a viewpoint that much more closely supports conventional
British Imperial politics in their desire to “have that white brush” and
actively disregard the warnings of the local native population (55). This
contempt is formulated as a kind of colonial conquest that sits along-
side the ambitions of Glasgow’s engineering project. “I never give in to
them,” claims Glasgow of the Irish (54):

“The other day I told one of my fellows to cut down a thorn bush
that came in my way surveying. He told me it was a holy thorn, and
he wouldn’t stir it. I just took the bill-hook and cut it down myself”
… “Quite right too,” said Lady Susan … “that’s the way to talk to
these people. Why, it’s as bad as the Land League, not being allowed
to draw one of the nicest coverts in the country, for rubbish of that
kind … I don’t care, Mr. Glasgow and I will take the hounds to
Cahirdreen, and we’ll have that white brush.”
(54–55)

Lady Susan’s nod to the Land League mirrors the political tensions over
land rights in the period and the tenant rebellions, which would eventu-
ally result in the economic ruin of many of the Protestant landed gentry.
Within this political setup, the fox is represented as being of the land
and, arguably, a symbol of anarchy and rebellion that possibly alludes to
the Irish nationalist politician and land reform agitator, Charles ­Stewart
Parnell. “Mr. Fox” was one of Parnell’s numerous codenames when
meeting his lover, Katherine O’Shea, and it was widely publicized in
the 1880s when Parnell’s long-standing adultery was exposed. The fox
also serves in the novel as a kind of primitive sign of a more natural, if
somewhat archaic, way of life that resists the modernizing impulses of
English colonialism.
Glasgow’s railway project, which literally beckons the fox to the sur-
face, is seen as an imposition on the landscape—the felled trees that
74 Anne Jamison
make way for the new railway lines are described as “fallen comrades”
with “twisted, agonized roots”—and this encumbrance is already chang-
ing the time-honored ways of the native Irish (23–24):

The ring of the trowel traveled far on the wind across the heather, a
voice of civilization, saying pertinent, unhesitating things to a coun-
try where all was loose, limitless, and inexact. Up here, by the shores
of Lough Ture, people had, from all ages, told the time by the sun,
and half-an-hour either way made no difference to any one; now –
most wondrous of impossibilities – the winter sunrise was daily her-
alded by the steely shriek of an engine whirling truckloads of men to
their work across the dark and dumb bog-lands.
(100–1)

Glasgow’s project, however, soon fails due to his own misreading of

the landscape, as well as his economic greed. The prophesying of the
bad luck that will come from throwing the hillside into the bog of
Tully proves to be less superstition than rational fact. Local knowledge
reveals that the bog cannot be filled due to its watery subterranean pas-
sages: “[t]here’s wather runnin’ undher the ground there in every place
… the bog itsel’ is only sittin’ on it. There’s holes up in Cahirdreen
that’s sixty feet deep, and wather runnin’ in the bottom o’ them” (104).
It is, eventually, this inability to “fill” the bog of Tully with gravel that
thwarts Glasgow’s economic ambitions in Ireland: “Eight months now
they’re sthrivin’ to fill that spot” (104). Surveying the wreckage of his
project toward the end of the novel, the reader is further reminded that
Glasgow had “left no margin for mistakes” in his competitive tender
for the railway contract which was based on “cheap Irish labor” (121).
The “singular audacity of engineering to force a line of rails across
such a morass” is not unlike the brutal disregard of the hunters for the
Irish landscape and Glasgow’s failure additionally evokes “Letters from
Ireland” by the British social theorist, Harriet Martineau. Travelling by
rail from Dublin to Galway in 1852, Martineau writes:

The marvel would have been, a quarter of a century ago, that the
weight of a railway train should ever be carried across the bog at all
… the engineer’s difficulties were wholly with the consistency of the
soil … A more desolate tract of country than that which stretches
forward from the boundary of Lord Cloncarty’s liberal improve-
ments, we are hardly likely ever to see. It makes the imagination
ache, like the eye … When Cromwell transplanted all disaffected
families from other parts to Connaught, and when Connaught be-
came the proverbial alternative to hell, the great bog was no doubt
the uppermost image in men’s minds.
(69–71)
 Female Desire, Colonial Ireland 75
The text thus repeatedly validates the superstitions of the native Irish
and shows such thinking to have its roots in rational science; the natu-
ral and the supernatural here seem to converge. Martineau’s “Letters”
are also more broadly suggestive of the difficulties in cultivating Irish
bog land which was, at one time in history, thought to be valuable real
estate. In The Silver Fox, the untamable landscape is viewed with a cer-
tain ­degree of reverence similar to Somerville’s nostalgia over a lost fifth
sense, but it is also linked to the broader inability of English colonial
imperatives to domesticate and modernize Ireland’s native inhabitants.
On this latter point, the authors reserve a quorum of ambivalence and
the text seems to seek an alternative politics with regard to Irish-English
social and political relations.
Notably, it is this dangerous, hellish, watery bog land onto which
the fox entices its pursuers, leading at least one of them to their near-
death. It is, moreover, on this treacherous landscape that the otherwise
divided (by reason of class, race, and local politics) Irish and English
women of the novel are drawn together in a new social and political
understanding of each other. The Irish hunting ground of the novel is
both embedded in the supernatural—it is the home of the silver fox,
as well as the unnatural sightings of the dead Quin men—as well as a
place that breaks with gender conventions. The women who participate
in the hunt experience the “excitement of success” and their prowess
as skilled riders is acknowledged and recognized by others in the field
(77). As Erika Munkwitz notes in “Vixens of Venery,” horse riding and
hunting for women in the late nineteenth century played a significant
role in the “larger cause of women’s emancipation and the wider rec-
ognition of their freedoms and abilities” (75). Women had to display
“skill and tact” in handling their mounts, as well as develop “inner
strength and confidence” in order to “become knowledgeable and profi-
cient in horsemanship” (78). The personal autonomy and independence
women learned through sport arguably began to carry over into their
more domestic and social lives and Munkwitz demonstrates that the
increasing popularity of riding manuals for women coincided with the
“appearance of the ‘New Woman’, in which new images of independent
and empowered femininity were constructed in and by the fin-de-siècle
British media” (81).
The Silver Fox brings these concerns together as the three main
women of the novel are drawn onto the boggy Irish terrain, a hunting
landscape that is not only haunted by the silver fox and the ghosts of Tom
and Danny Quin, but is elsewhere recognized as being innately steeped
in the supernatural. Both Somerville and Ross were keen ­huntswomen
and Somerville took over for her brother, Aylmer, in 1903 as Master
of Fox Hounds for the West Carbery hunt, making her Ireland’s first
female MFH. In her later essays and reminiscences, she returns mul-
tiple times to her experiences of hunting and riding in Ireland. In The
76 Anne Jamison
Sweet Cry of Hounds (1936), the Irish landscape becomes “the next
world” and the young MFH is seen to “forget himself and all things
earthly” (5, 8). The hounds lose themselves “as finally and irrevocably
as in death” in dense coverts, and the ancient woods and forests of the
landscape are full of “mischievous woodland spirits” and would “make
the fortune of a fairy-tale” (4, 7). The “dream-like rush” Slaney expe-
riences during one of the longest hunts in the novel anticipates these
later recorded feelings and, like the landscape described in The Sweet
Cry of Hounds, riders, horses, foxes, and hounds are seen to disappear
into and reappear out of the landscape with uncanny swiftness: “[t]he
fox melts away,” writes Somerville, “impossible to express the imper-
ceptible way in which a fox can disappear … he is in a single instant
incredibly lost to sight” (77, 43–44).
At the same time, particularly in The Silver Fox, this uncanny bending
of rational perception is also something that bends conventional propri-
eties between men and women. The extramarital relationship that devel-
ops between Lady Susan and Glasgow is enabled by the practicalities of
the hunt and the proximity of the riders:

Once or twice they left off twelve or fourteen miles from home,
and a friendship can progress marvelously in the slow return in the
twilight, with the golden link of a day’s enjoyment, and the easy
snatches of talk and silence of a tête-à-tête on horseback.
(91)

The last section of this chapter will suggest, however, that it is the re-
lationships between women which are, in fact, the most daring of the
novel and it is these relationships that draw together most strongly the
novel’s politics and fantastic elements. The relationship between Slaney
and Lady Susan, in particular, also echoes the period’s broader concerns
with female behavior. Slaney’s desire for intellectual companionship and
friendship at the start of the novel is heightened when Lady Susan visits
Ireland with her husband, Hugh, and resides in the home of Slaney’s
uncle, French Court. Despite Lady Susan’s initial waspish conceit, cou-
pled with her predilection to label all women as either opponents or
“non combatants” in the all-consuming battle for male attention, Slaney
can’t help but admit that she is “fond of Lady Susan”: “it was against all
theories of woman-kind, yet the fact remained that Slaney liked Lady
Susan” (50, 140, 112). In their depiction of the two women, Somerville
and Ross recognize the patriarchal forces that often work to pit one
woman against another and, like their protagonist, express much regret
over the lost opportunities for the blossoming of female friendship. It is
with a “pang to Slaney’s heart,” for example, that Lady Susan turns in
her distress at the sight of Tom Quin’s drowned body to a male figure
 Female Desire, Colonial Ireland 77
rather than to her, expecting, as Slaney rightly assumes, “no quarter
from a girl” (135).
The tentative fellowship that forms between the two women at the
end of the novel is largely a result of Slaney’s refusal to yield to the
same social impulses which have thus far governed Lady Susan’s at-
titude toward her female circle of acquaintances. Slaney’s attempts to
safeguard Lady Susan’s reputation in the latter’s “daring and careless”
flirtation with Glasgow is an indication of both her care for Lady Su-
san and her sense of female solidarity against male predatory attention
(180). Slaney, too, has past understanding of the beguiling and false
attentions of Glasgow and, in this shared experience, grow the seeds
of her empathy and feeling for Lady Susan. This sisterly bond signifi-
cantly replaces the earlier posturing of Lady Susan in her attempts to
portray herself as a feminist figure. With her bicycle, cigarettes, and
Parisian hair dye, Lady Susan is offered up in the novel as a Punch
caricature of the New Woman figure of the 1890s, the “young modern
woman and her bicycle” so excoriated by Glasgow until he is charmed
by the becoming curves of Lady Susan’s waist (138). The portrayal
of Lady Susan in the novel appears to be consciously situated in the
public media debates of the period over the Woman Question and, in
particular, on the emergence of the New Woman figure. Lady Susan’s
character is suggestive of Elizabeth Lynn Linton’s “Girl of the Period,”
the nineteenth-century nemesis of the English “ideal of womanhood”
and an increasing menace to England’s national and moral character:

The Girl of the Period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her
face, as the first articles of her personal religion – a creature whose
sole idea of life is fun; whose sole aim is unbounded luxury; and
whose dress is the chief object of such thought and intellect as she
possesses … the Girl of the Period has done away with such moral
muffishness as consideration for others, or regard to counsel and
rebuke … she is far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-
career by these slow old morals; and as she lives to please herself, she
does not care if she displeases everyone else.
(2–3)

Linton published her essay in 1868 in the Saturday Review, and it both
stoked public debate on the changing role of women in society, and was
the cause of much controversy. Linton continued her journalistic cam-
paign against this new type of woman throughout her career and, in
1891, published “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents” in The Nine-
teenth Century, once again upbraiding those women she perceived as
“obliterating the finer traits of civilization”: “She smokes after dinner
with the men; in railway carriages; in public rooms – when she is allowed.
78 Anne Jamison
She thinks she is thereby vindicating her independence and honoring her
emancipated womanhood. Heaven bless her!” (596).
The opening scene of The Silver Fox, which has been read as a tirade
against English manners and customs by, for example, Declan Kiberd,
and which reverses the common stereotypes of England and Ireland,
takes on an added context here. The emphasis on Lady Susan’s mod-
ern appearance and selfish behavior is set not just in contrast to a more
provincial but less vulgar Ireland, but also against the “ideal of wom-
anhood” reflected in the more modest, innocent, and civilized Slaney
­Morris. Like the women described in Linton’s articles, Lady Susan’s de-
fiance of gender traditions and conventional female behavior is viewed
in the novel as “artificial,” an almost superficial mimicry of the more
serious and intellectual work of public female emancipation (3). Lady Su-
san’s feminist stance thus clearly only exists on a superficial level and it is
only in the female relationships she begins to cultivate at the close of the
novel that any true feminist feeling and attempts at social change become
evident. The coming together of Slaney and Lady Susan also moves to
one side the national divisions that dominate the rest of the novel and its
tragedies, foregrounding instead female friendship as the site of political
healing. Slaney and Lady Susan finally create their own shared female
values for an alternative sociopolitical community, one where women
have come to know themselves through “bitter experience” and come to-
gether to overcome those experiences (92). The novel thus rebukes Lady
Susan’s initial behavior toward Slaney and exposes the gendered social
conditions that encourage such behavior. Furthermore, the trajectory of
Slaney and Lady Susan’s friendship in the novel is, finally, also an explo-
ration of how these gendered social conditions can be challenged.
Such ideas are further cemented in Lady Susan’s encounter with
­Maria Quin. Upon witnessing Lady Susan fall from her horse to her
near-death in pursuit of the silver fox, Maria is initially convinced that
such an act is “terrific and just retribution” for the deaths her family
has suffered at the hands of Glasgow and his friends (166). However,
with her acknowledgement that, “Mother of Our Lord! – the rider was
a woman,” Maria moves to save Lady Susan’s life: “the peasant heart
struggled in the grave-clothes of hatred and superstition, and burst
forth with its native impetuousness and warmth” (166). Maria’s sav-
ing of Lady Susan is emblematic of the female solidarity Slaney has
exhibited toward Hugh’s wife throughout the novel. Moreover, Maria’s
gesture temporarily discards the national and class issues at the heart
of the novel’s tragedies and, like the budding partnership between Lady
Susan and Slaney, finds common ground in the social plight of women.
Risking her own reputation, Maria shares with Lady Susan the impro-
priety of Glasgow’s former behavior toward her and warns Lady Susan
against him:
 Female Desire, Colonial Ireland 79
“Mind yerself!” she said in a whisper; “that fella would throw ye
on the roadside whin he’d be tired o’ ye … I can tell ye of the day I
wint to Glashgow to the office, axing him to take back the price o’
the land, and he put a hand on me to kiss me; he thought that was
all he had to do to humour me. He remembers that day agin me yet”.
(173–74)

Recognizing the import of Maria’s revelation, the two women end their
encounter on equal ground and with a handshake that reinforces the so-
cial and emotional impact of their meeting. It is also a pact which elicits
the only reasoned political agreement and understanding of the novel in
Lady Susan’s promise to no longer hunt the silver fox of the novel’s title,
who, it is believed, has brought such ill omens upon the Quin family.
The shedding of Maria’s hatred and superstition, as well as Lady Susan’s
recounting of and admittance to her ignorance of the local situation,
also leads to Maria’s concession that Lady Susan’s behavior has thus far
been one of an uninformed stranger, opposed to the machinations of
one “wanting to desthroy us,” and this further frames the new political
understanding between the two women (173).
Both women share their past experiences in order to develop a new
social and emotional understanding of each other and, in so doing,
they begin to disrupt the novel’s fated political trajectory. In this light,
­Maria’s uninhibited conversation with Lady Susan can be seen to by-
pass class conventions in order to establish the grounds for friendship
and allow an ethic of female solidarity and care to emerge. Maria’s and
Lady Susan’s concluding self-reflections on their joint situation with re-
gard to Glasgow, as well as the broader English-Irish political relations
which damagingly govern their respective communities, also hints at
their own individual sociopolitical maturation. Their outspoken conver-
sation leads both women away from unthinking acceptance of the super-
stitions, opinions, and politics of their friends, families, and respective
communities, and instead encourages independence of thought.
All three women have, in one way or another, suffered at the hands
of Glasgow and it is initially this misery that unites them. Out of their
collective mistreatment, however, and their sharing of their individual
circumstances, stems the kind of mutual interest, trust, concern, inti-
macy, and benevolence that is characteristic of the bonds of friendship
between women recognized by Janice Raymond. It is this bond that
eventually empowers the three women to make alternative social and
political choices. Such relationships, argues Raymond, force the sharing
of different perspectives and moral values and, in turn, foster “vicar-
ious participation in the very experience of moral alternatives” (199).
As a result, the kind of friendships between women which Somerville
and Ross depict in The Silver Fox are ones which have the capability of
80 Anne Jamison
broadening and enriching the “empirical base for evaluating both the
abstract moral guidelines we already hold and alternatives we might
consider” (Raymond 199). Female friendship for Somerville and Ross
is, in The Silver Fox, more than just a private and emotional bond. It
is a political tie which engenders a relational sense of self that has the
potential to transform social and gender relations through its support of
unconventional values, as well as stimulate moral growth and act as an
egalitarian model for citizens of an alternative polity.
The affections of the heart between female friends in The Silver Fox
are, however, also determined by an intimate and sometimes explicitly
erotic context. Slaney’s private emotional and increasingly intellectual
admiration for Lady Susan, for example, is aroused and most explicitly
admitted during a scene in which Slaney is also drawn to acknowledge
Lady’s Susan’s physical attractiveness:

Slaney had never thought her so handsome; her eyes seemed to look
out of her heart and into a remote place unseen of others, instead of
summing up things around her with her wonted practical glance …
the fact remained that Slaney liked Lady Susan.
(112)

Slaney’s growing sense of moral care for the latter thus frames itself
within an intimate context, one which highlights Slaney’s admittance
and appreciation of Lady Susan’s physical attractiveness. Lady Susan
and Maria Quin also share a similarly tense moment of heightened phys-
icality as they shake hands in friendship and with a newfound sense of
female solidarity and cultural understanding. After the accident, Lady
Susan faces Maria in a disheveled and physically exposed state which is
charged with erotic subtext. Drawing hard breaths after her fall, Lady
Susan’s hat dangles by its guard and her bare shoulder is revealed by the
burst sleeve of her riding habit (168). Maria stares at her “as if taking
in her good looks” and issues her warning about Glasgow (173). The
two women shake hands in silence “but some thrill ran horns to Maria’s
heart at the meeting of the palms, and sent the dew to her hot eyes …
Lady Susan … walked uncertainly, and once or twice her hand went
up to her eyes” (175). The touching of the two women’s palms, which
bring tears to both their eyes, is both a sign of female sexual arousal and
the intoxication of political power. A layer of physical intimacy is thus
added to the temporary moment of care and trust which the two women
engender in their brief encounter, and this intimacy is marked by both an
erotic thrill and the triumph of female political and emotional cohesion.
The gains in self-knowledge, as well as the accompanying individual
spiritual and intellectual growth, which Slaney, Lady Susan, and Maria
Quin exhibit by the end of the novel become, therefore, reliant on the
erotics and politics of these female ties. The possibilities of same-sex
 Female Desire, Colonial Ireland 81
desire are acknowledged and cautiously explored in The Silver Fox but
never come to fruition. By the end of the novel, Lady Susan has recon-
ciled with Hugh, who has regained his lost confidence and masculinity;
Slaney is married to Major Bunbury (Hugh’s English school friend), her
intellectual equal; and they all learn that Glasgow, after returning to
England with his wife, has died on an engineering project in a mine shaft
accident in Argentina. Traditional heterosexual marriage thus eventually
overrides the female unions which have been tentatively explored in the
story. Glasgow’s death, however, rings a note of uneasiness at the end of
The Silver Fox, and this temporarily disrupts the otherwise conventional
quartet of Slaney and Bunbury, and Lady Susan and Hugh. The closing
scene of the novel recalls Lady Susan’s earlier sexually daring exploits
with Glasgow, as well as the political rift in Irish-English relations, and
the story refuses to conform to the usual happy ending.
The final chapter of The Silver Fox is removed from the rural demesne
of French Court with its dangerous but exhilarating landscape and hunt-
ing and is instead set in Dublin during a game of polo in which Hugh is
applauded for his horsemanship and sporting success (189). Slaney and
Lady Susan remain friends, but there is a lack of authenticity that marks
both Lady Susan’s reconciliation with Hugh, and her bond with Slaney.
As she was with Glasgow, Lady Susan is tempted by the attentions of
Captain Onslow as they both watch Hugh playing polo, and the reader
is reminded of Lady Susan’s potential for infidelity in the “charming”
glance of recognition she offers Onslow in response to his flirtatious
questions (191). Lady Susan’s ride back to her hotel with Slaney in “the
Dublin outside car,” with its “exhilarating swing and swiftness,” is also
reminiscent of her improper and near fatal journey with Glasgow in
the brake van engine (191). Furthermore, Lady Susan’s friendship with
Slaney is marked by their recent shopping expedition in the city and
rings a superficial note. Here the admiring gaze is reversed between
Slaney and Lady Susan, but the erotic and political frisson of Slaney’s
earlier feelings for Lady Susan are altogether forgotten: “‘I never saw
you look as well as you do to-day. I’m awfully glad I made you get that
hat. It makes your eyes just the right color’” (193). Hugh’s sharing of
Glasgow’s death, which he reads in the newspaper at the polo club, also
brings back memories for all of them of “‘all that time – and what they
said of the bad luck, and everything’” (195). The silver fox thus signifi-
cantly rears its head again, even if only in memory, to haunt the final
pages of the novel.
Maureen O’Connor’s study of fox hunting in Somerville and Ross’s fic-
tion argues that the figure of the fox is “elusive and wily, a trickster and
sorcerer,” but also an underprivileged figure that is hunted for the “plea-
sure of killing” and expressive of “sectarian and class tensions that are
sometimes resolved, but just as often complicated by gender allegiances”
(118). The briefly felt female solidarity of Lady Susan, Maria Quin, and
82 Anne Jamison
Slaney Morris certainly conforms to this reading and the ending of the
novel recalls the power of that female bond, but also the complexities of
class and race relations in late nineteenth-century Ireland that threaten
to pull that bond apart. The fox’s disruption of the novel’s closing het-
erosexual unions also amplifies the alternative same-sex possibilities for
women and this erotic element is intertwined with the colonial politics
and supernatural fears of the novel. Glasgow’s railway project in Ireland
is thwarted by Irish superstition and the unyielding geography of the
landscape long before his wife sends him home and, as Roz Cowman has
argued, that same landscape is “described with an intimate detailed pas-
sion” and is “profoundly eroticized” (99). If Glasgow is representative in
the story of masculine colonial power, then that power is metaphorically
overcome by an erotic female authority which is made explicit through
the supernatural devices of the novel and which eventually send Glasgow
to his death in a subsequent colonial context in the Argentine Republic.

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Munkwitz, Erika. “Vixens of Venery: Women, Sport, and Fox-Hunting in Britain,
1860–1914.” Critical Survey, vol. 24, no. 1, 2012, pp. 74–87.
O’Connor, Maureen. Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s
Writing. Peter Lang, 2010.
Raymond, Janice G. A Passion for Friends: Towards a Philosophy of Female
Affection. Beacon Press, 1986.
Ross, Martin. Manuscript Notebook – Undated. Ms. 17. Somerville and Ross
Papers. Queen’s University Belfast, UK.
 Female Desire, Colonial Ireland 83
Somerville, E. Œ. Manuscript Notebook – Undated. Ms. 17. Somerville and
Ross Papers. Queen’s University Belfast, UK.
———, and Martin Ross. Happy Days: Essays of Sorts. Longmans, Green and
Co., 1946.
———. The Sweet Cry of Hounds. Methuen, 1936.
Stevens, Julie Anne. “Flashlights and Fiction: The Development of the Modern
Irish Short Story.” The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth
Century: A Ghostly Genre, edited by Helen O’Briain and Julie Anne Stevens,
Four Courts Press, 2010, pp. 137–154.
———. The Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross. Four Courts Press, 2006.
———. “Political Animals. Somerville and Ross and Percy French on Edwardian
Ireland.” Synge and Edwardian Ireland, edited by Brian Cliff and Nicholas
Grene, Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 103–115.
6 The Haunting House in
Elizabeth Bowen’s
“The Shadowy Third”
Céline Magot

“The Shadowy Third” appeared in Elizabeth Bowen’s first short story

collection Encounters (1923), a grouping of tales that, like much of her
writing in the 1920s, focuses on ordinary social interactions and every-
day conversation; indeed, one may think in particular of her second short
story collection Ann Lee’s (1926) and the novel The Hotel (1927). These
early works might account for her reputation as a writer considered to
“embody the very bulwark of the conventional and ‘proper,’ of traditional
realism and conservative ‘society’” as formulated and refuted by Andrew
Bennett and Nicholas Royle (xiv). Bowen herself claimed, “at no time,
even in the novel, do I consider realism to be my forte” (Afterthought 80).
For if she gives realistic accounts of conventional behaviors, she does so
precisely to disrupt them by revealing what lies underneath the ­varnish
of social behavior, like repressed or unexpressed feelings, tensions, or
passions coated in polite normalcy.1 Even if it stands out as the only ghost
story in Bowen’s first published work, “The Shadowy Third” can also be
seen as a more radical expression of the same underlying tensions. The
story chronicles how a deceased wife comes back to disrupt the quiet
evening of her husband and his new wife who is expecting a child. As the
eerie atmosphere gradually sets in, it is revealed that the first wife died of
neglect and unrequited love after losing her own child.
“The Shadowy Third” is akin to nineteenth-century narratives of
­domestic entrapment such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow
Wallpaper (1899). It reactivates some of the stock tropes of the ­fantastic:
the genre of the domestic Gothic, the theme of entrapment in marriage,
and the character of the villain who holds the key to a mysterious locked
chest in a cold, damp house. It also explores and expands upon the
­intimate connection between the two wives, something found in many
women’s fantastic tales; Lucie Armitt describes this motif as “a specifi-
cally female bonding at the centre of a house that refuses, despite itself, to
be a mere hearth and home” (Contemporary Women’s Fiction 129). This
refusal to be “a mere hearth and home” influences not only the house,
but the objects inside. Bowen’s story draws its singularity in the peculiar
role that is attributed to things: they become recipients of the haunting
as it spreads and permeates the house and the objects in it. They even
 The Haunting House 85
become active agents in the haunting process so that the house does not
act “despite itself,” nor is it a mere setting like in many fantastic stories.
On the contrary, it actively and willfully cooperates in the haunting as it
becomes endowed with a life of its own: a haunting house.
Bowen absorbed the heritage of the Irish Gothic that many ­critics have
analyzed as a way to exorcise religious, political, and social ­tensions.
But the house in the story is also based on Bowen’s family-owned Irish
­mansion, Bowen’s Court, built in 1776 on a portion of Irish land seized by
Cromwell. As the last heir to this estate, Bowen had first-hand ­awareness
of what she termed the “inherent wrong” in her personal ­situation. Neil
Corcoran insists that “the act of colonization makes p ­ eople ghosts of
themselves while still alive: deracinated, bilocated, [they are] always con-
scious of an elsewhere and an other” (30). Indeed, Bowen herself writes
“my family got their position and drew their power from a ­situation that
shows an inherent wrong” (Bowen’s Court 453). She dramatized this anx-
iety in Bowen’s Court (1942), a historical narrative about the family house
that is endowed with the status of a living person although it had already
been demolished at the time of publication: “There is a sort of perpetu-
ity about livingness, and it is part of the character of Bowen’s Court to
be, in sometimes its silent way, very much alive” (459). Bowen’s Court
is a haunting, recurring presence that informs many fi ­ ctitious houses in
Bowen’s work. What makes it such a powerful ­archetype for a fantastic
story is that it is a territory where life and death are u
­ ncertain and porous;
the ancestors’ house is eternally standing and alive as if nourished by the
generations that have inhabited it.2 Their presence has also spread to the
landscape around the house: “The land outside B ­ owen’s Court’s windows
left prints on my ancestors’ eyes that looked out: perhaps their eyes left,
also, prints on the scene? If so, those prints were part of the scene to me”
(Bowen’s Court 451). Like Bowen’s Court, the house in “The Shadowy
Third” is permeated with a spectral p ­ resence made of a past life that it
passes on to its present dwellers, for in Bowen’s fantastic fiction absence
leads not merely to presence, but to omnipresence. As such, the setting of
“The Shadowy Third” reveals its status as both haunted and haunting.
The story opens precisely as Martin, the husband in the couple, is on
his way back home. As a dominant and domineering character within
the plot, his point of view filters the story; as a husband, he exerts control
over the two other protagonists: his current wife as well as his previous
one, a shadowy presence from the past who keeps reappearing in various
forms in the story. Martin is the figure of the “bad husband” identified by
Patricia Murphy in Victorian Gothic texts as a “linguistic arbiter, famil-
ial authority, and guardian of the social order, in the process regulating
gender roles as well as sexuality” (201). The text hints at his latent vio-
lence by giving him the features of a stereotypical vampire: he is “a pale
little man, with big teeth and prominent eyes” (75). He is said to catch
his train “by the skin of his teeth” every evening, an expression that in
86 Céline Magot
this context may evoke a vampire’s kiss for Martin’s love appears to be
literally lethal:

sitting opposite to him in a bus one would have found it incredible

that there could be a woman to love him. As a matter of fact there
were two, one dead, not counting a mother whose inarticulate devo-
tion he resented, and a pale sister, also dead.
(75)

The opening of the story thus draws upon the tradition of the Gothic
novel by introducing a villain who preys on the women closest to him.3
Either dead or scorned, women who love Martin are dismissed from
the text as from his esteem and interest with the exception of his current
wife, “the only woman of value to him” (75). She immediately appears
to be, however, a weakened, self-effaced character when they meet at
the station and she finds herself “speechless” as if in a dormant state
(75). Throughout the story it is clear that Martin dominates their rela-
tionship and, even though affectionately, diminishes or depreciates her
as he calls her “little woman” or “funny little woman” (77). He delights
in “her shy tremor, and the little embarrassed way she would lean down
to make a snatch at his bag, which he would sometimes allow her to
carry” (75, emphasis added). Through Martin’s point of view, the text
belittles her actions and attitude and questions her self-determination.
Similarly, she is only referred to through the nickname he gives her,
Pussy, a familiar, endearing name yet also a slang term that operates
a metonymic reduction of the character and degrades her down to her
genitals or to an animal: “He could hear her moving about in the hall—
such a Pussy!—hanging up his overcoat, then opening the oak chest and
rattling things about in it for all the world as though she were after a
mouse” (78).4 Cat-like, Pussy is aligned with the female stereotypes of
sweetness and care. If a predator, she is after the smallest prey and just as
she is associated with a descending movement (“little” and “lean down”
in the previous quote), Martin here is connected to what is above or on
top (“hanging up his overcoat”). The text therefore symbolically estab-
lishes a hierarchy between the characters that reveals Martin’s view of
reality and his velvet-gloved domination in the marriage, which is but a
softened reproduction of the torments perpetrated against the first wife.
For even if her suffering remains off-scene, it might underlie or at least
partly explain the haunting at work in the short story.
Indeed, in her introduction to The Second Ghost Book Bowen draws
a link between hauntings and “scenes of violence”:

[…] are we now to take it that any and every place is, has been or
may be a scene of violence? Our interpretation of violence is wider
than once it was; we are aware that the blow physically struck is but
 The Haunting House 87
one means by which man injures man, that cruelty may be worst in
its mental part, that the emotions have their own scale of torment,
that the most deep-going outrages may be psychological. We fear
that which hath power to hurt the soul. Inflictions and endurances,
exactions, injustices, infidelities—do not these wreak their havoc,
burn in their histories, leave their mark? Who knows what has gone
on, anywhere?
(Bowen, Afterthought 102–3)5

The violence in “The Shadowy Third” is of the second kind she mentions,
“cruelty […] in its mental part” or emotional violence that is revealed
through Martin’s own recollections of his heartlessness to his dying wife
before and after the loss of their child:

He remembered how he had heard Her in the east room those last
two months before she went, opening and shutting the drawers. It
had disturbed him, working at his desk in the dining-room below,
and he had come up angrily once or twice […]; before the child came
she had been in an aimless bustle, but afterwards she did nothing,
nothing at all, not even keep house for him decently. That was prob-
ably what had made her ill – that and the disappointment.
(81)

Martin’s vagueness about the exact nature of “the disappointment”

that caused her death betrays his repressed feelings of guilt and sug-
gests that he may be held responsible. In his memory his first wife is
depicted through her obsessive acts or absence of action; however in an
instance of textual violence and denial of her existence as an individual,
he never gives her a name, which deprives her of a personal identity. So
even though Martin seems to have a radically different attitude toward
the two women—feeling scorn for the first one as opposed to a poten-
tially paternal tenderness for the second—the way he considers them is
in both cases problematic: to give a degrading nickname or no name is a
form of domination, whether to control the present or dismiss the past.
Martin’s desire to discard the memory of his first marriage is betrayed
by his aggressive reaction when he notices that Pussy’s thimble case is
“the same as another, so familiar once,” a disturbing reappearance:
“‘Where did you get that, Pussy?’ he asked fiercely. […] He confiscated
it and brought her a morocco one next day, with a new thimble in it
that did not fit” (81). Martin’s disquieting experience, an instance of the
uncanny as described by Freud, could be described as a form of fragmen-
tary return: the dead wife is brought back in the shape of an object that
used to cover a part of her body and that is itself encased in a miniature
coffin.6 But in the same way as his guilt and memories are repressed,
Martin discards the resurgent, once familiar object.
88 Céline Magot
The imperious confiscation of the thimble case also reveals Martin’s
attempt to distinguish between the two women, to avoid their associ-
ation and go against the temporal fluidity at play where the past reap-
pears in the present. He contrasts their actions in a binary manner: “She
had filled the house with draperies, and Pussy had taken them down”
(78, emphasis in original). However, his view is countered by the fantas-
tic narrative that reveals continuity and consistency from one marriage
to the next. Martin uses sight as a means of differentiating between
the two women: “Pussy was long-sighted and always looked at things
from as far away as possible” (81). On the contrary, her predecessor was
short-sighted and used to blink when she looked at him, as expressed
in a succession of paradoxes and contradictions that reflect the ensnar-
ing dimension of marriage for the first wife: “Of course she ought to
have worn glasses; he hated women in glasses, and she knew it, but her
short-sightedness annoyed him and he had frequently said so” (79). The
first wife’s short-sightedness may symbolically stand for her inability
to acknowledge the injustice of her own situation—the “unknowing-
ness” of the ancestors (Bowen’s Court 451). Similarly, Pussy is blind to
the ­latent violence in their relationship and the insidious way in which
Martin diminishes her: “When he spoke, [Pussy’s] intent eyes fixed
themselves on him unseeingly” (81, emphasis added). However, Pussy’s
long-sightedness and her need to look “from as far away as possible”
might also apply on a temporal scale: she can “see” into the distant past
and connect with the first wife. The superficial opposition established by
Martin in fact unites the two women through a common characteristic,
their imperfect vision, and challenges his own perception of them.
As he attempts to assert concrete categories and hierarchies (the past
vs. the present, the first vs. the second wife, long- vs. short-sightedness),
the fantastic mode challenges his ordering of reality to reveal a more fluid
world. If on the surface, the text (as controlled by Martin’s focalization)
asserts that he loves Pussy and loathes his first wife—“she would […]
rattle her work-box maddeningly”—the clear-cut distinction is un-
dermined when a few lines later Pussy is seen “rattling things about”
(78). The repetition of the same verb introduces dramatic irony: the text
suggests in spite of its focal character that both women perform similar
actions, just as their place in relation to their husband is in fact compara-
ble. The underlying meaning contradicts the character’s effort to control
the narrative. Similarly, although Martin affectionately diminishes Pussy,
it is revealed that “she was half an inch taller than he, and her high heels
gave her a further advantage” (76). Thus, the text disrupts the hierarchical
order that the authoritative focal character imposes upon the narrative to
produce a subtext that reveals a different order. It is in precisely this way
that not only the house, but everything it stands for—domestic stability,
traditional gender dynamics, and colonial legacies—is haunted, suffused
with memories of what once was and what could, but never will, be.
 The Haunting House 89
The fantastic mode repeatedly disrupts Martin’s regulating perspective
on reality, but the most obvious element of disorder in a ghost story is
temporal disruption: what should belong to the past comes back to haunt
the present. More specifically, Bowen’s fantastic world (shaped after the
model of Bowen’s Court) suggests that what has passed away returns to
the house, which becomes the recipient and active agent of the haunting
process. Just as Martin is haunted by his memories, the house as it used
to be when he lived in it with his first wife becomes more and more vivid:

As they passed through the archway into the hall he put out his hand
to sweep something aside; then smiled shamefacedly. It was funny
how he always expected that portière […]; the house as it had been
was always in his mind, more present than the house as it was.
(78, emphasis in original)

The parapraxis betrays yet another instance of the return of the ­repressed.
Through a gesture that materializes ghost doors and furniture, the house
becomes the place of inscription of the past. Significantly, the past super-
imposes upon the present in places of passage such as the threshold or
the stairs: “He could never get used to the silence half-way up the stairs,
where the grandfather clock used to be. Often he found himself half-way
across the hall to see what was the matter with it” (78). The missing
clock becomes a symbol of arrested time while the repetition of “half-
way” insists on the idea of incompleteness, for Martin is not done with
the past. The expression “haunted house” does not apply in this story
for the place is active in the resurging process and imprints its obsessive
past image upon the character’s mind and body. It is a “haunting house”
that generates fear: after they have walked back from the station Pussy
attempts to convince Martin to stay out in the garden with such insis-
tence that he remarks, “one would think you were afraid of the house”
(77). Pussy is aware of the haunting quality of the house that seems to
be alive. If her final words are a clear statement of its antagonism—“I
sometimes feel the very room hates us”—her earlier attempts to explain
her feelings rely on a more ambiguous understanding of the house (82):

I’ve been so lonely all day—well, not lonely, but the house was so
quiet, I could hear myself think. I went into the east room and sat
on the window-seat. It is a cold room; I don’t know how we’ll ever
make it warm enough. […] Has it never been used? […] It’s not an
empty-feeling room, like the attic.
(80)

The succession of oppositions and contradictions (“lonely” and “not

lonely”; “quiet” and “hear”; “cold” and “warm”; “never been used” and
“not an empty-feeling room”) underscores the tension and confusion in
90 Céline Magot
the character’s mind, yet it is in keeping with the logic of the fantastic
narrative: in a house as cold as death that is permeated with the first
wife’s presence, Pussy cannot quite feel lonely for she indeed is not alone.
The haunting process in the story spreads out and makes the ­absent
one ubiquitous. In fact, the story stages the paradox of death as ­described
by the art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman: “When
someone vanishes, it is said they become a ‘shadow’. At the very ­moment
they are buried in the ground, they become capable of being everywhere
else, of invading even the air that we breathe: haunting” (114).7 The first
wife is not only “everywhere else” but also everything else in an endless
process of metamorphosis. She becomes incessant thoughts on ­Martin’s
mind, uneasy impressions on Pussy’s, resurging gestures, ­objects, and
words, so that everything testifies of her presence, following what
­Rosemary Jackson has claimed is

the movement of the fantastic narrative […], one of metonymical

rather than of metaphorical process: one object does not stand for
another, but literally becomes that other, slides into it, metamorphosing
from one shape to another in a permanent flux and instability.
(41–42, emphasis in original)

Things and characters get caught in an endless process of becoming

other: suddenly, the house is both that which it is in the present as well as
that which it used to be, a manifestation of the dead wife’s presence and
of Martin’s memory of the past. Clear-cut identities are shattered in the
endless metamorphosis of the fantastic story as the characters themselves
become sites of haunting.
The ghostly omnipresence echoes Bowen’s remark about haunting
injustices in the introduction to The Second Ghost Book, “May not
obsession stay in the air which knew them, as a corpse stays nailed
down under a floor” (Afterthought 103). For Bowen haunting is not
a spectral manifestation of the dead: it is shadowy remains of feelings
that pervade a place, spread, and circulate to be transmitted.8 Ghosts
are feelings, thoughts, and emotions of the past that pass on into the
present. In this respect Bowen’s Court acts as the archetypal model for
the fictitious haunted house:

With each death, the air of the place had thickened: it had been added
to. The dead do not need to visit Bowen’s Court rooms – as I said,
we had no ghosts in that house – because they already permeated
them.
(Bowen’s Court 451)

Similarly, the wronged wife of “The Shadowy Third” makes no spectral

apparition for her emotions are already and permanently there, in the very
 The Haunting House 91
texture of the house as well as in its dwellers’ minds and bodies. Beyond the
ghostly portiere or the stopped grandfather clock the whole house seems to
be frozen in the state it was in when Martin moved in with his first wife:

Their house was among the first two or three on a new estate, and
overlooked rolling country from the western windows, from the east
the house-backs of new roads. It had been built for him at the time
of his first marriage, four years ago, and still smelt a little of plaster,
and was coldly distempered, which he hated, but they said it was not
yet safe to paper the walls.
(75)

The alliterating sounds seem to mimic the circulation of the haunting

that spreads around (“western windows,” “been built,” “still smelt”)
while the bare walls become symptomatic of the impossibility to cover
the past and leave it behind. The text accumulates Gothic motifs about
the house that is repeatedly described as damp and cold. It holds a locked
chest that Pussy wonders about: “‘The key’s lost,’ [Martin] said in sud-
den fear. ‘I know it’s lost. I’ll go up there some day and force open the
drawers myself—they’re empty’” (80–81). However, the text once more
contradicts the character’s assertion as it is mentioned earlier that on
her dull, dead-and-alive evenings the first wife had made baby-clothes
by the fire then, presumably after the baby’s death, “she had taken them
upstairs and locked them away” (78). All but ethereal the haunting pro-
cess extends and multiplies its concrete materializations so that the chest
of drawers becomes reminiscent of a human body, it becomes a womb
that contains baby clothes—poor replicas of the mother’s body pregnant
with the child—and becomes a casket that encases another body inside.
In many ways, the fluid circulation of haunting in the air, people, and
things substitutes the circle for the straight line of Martin’s orderly world
whether it be vertical (hierarchical) or horizontal (sequential): his con-
trolling power is overthrown as his attempt to leave the past behind is
countered by the movement of the fantastic in which emotions reemerge
and establish connections in the living world. The natural cycle of grow-
ing plants may be the most significant metamorphic cycle in the story.
After coming back from the station, Pussy likes to linger outside:

Today she said, ‘Come down and have a look at the garden, Martin;
I’ve been planting things.’ So he put down his bag and they walked to
the end of the garden, where a new flower-bed looked scratched-up
and disordered, and was edged with little drooping plants.
(75)

Once again, Martin’s perspective belittles Pussy’s actions and as-

sesses them as inducing disorder. Pussy remarks that the plants buried
92 Céline Magot
underground will shoot up to become visible, unwittingly turning them
into metaphors of the buried wife’s ghostly presence. Martin points at
disorder again when he objects that they will grow to hide the “smaller
things in front” in the same way that the past has spread to cover up the
present (76). Just as the locked chest of drawers and the thimble case du-
plicate images of the dead wife’s body, the flower-bed becomes her death-
bed or a tomb for her decaying body that Martin desecrates, “absently
prodding at the mould with his umbrella” (76). On the contrary Pussy
proves respectful of the sepulcher when she explains how careful she was
not to leave footmarks on the fl
­ ower-bed. Her footprints would material-
ize the remains of her own presence but her self-effacing anxiety mirrors
how she vanishes behind the overwhelming first wife whose ghostly pres-
ence invades the characters’ space. As they are still in the garden Pussy
tells Martin that she sometimes feels as though she could smell and hear
the sea. He replies:

“Yes, I know. One often gets that feeling.”

“Do you?”
“Well, no,” he said confusedly, “but I’m sure one does. I can imag-
ine it.” Someone had said the same thing to him, just here, three or
four years ago.
(76)

Here the text stages an uncanny present that is a mere repetition of the
past, which grammatically becomes the present in the phrases “One of-
ten gets that feeling” and “one does” although they in fact refer to the
deceased wife’s impressions. This is also an instance of the return of
the repressed first wife who lingers in Martin’s mind and reappears in
his speech where she takes the form of the ambivalent pronoun “one”
that can refer both to an unspecified, indefinite person (meaning every
person) as well as to a unique individual distinct from all others. The
pronoun therefore epitomizes the tension in the story and the source of
the haunting process: deprived of a name and an identity, the first wife is
no one yet she becomes everyone and everything.
Pussy’s words in turn become invaded by the unnamed, spreading
presence in the form of the euphemistic pronoun “Anybody” spelt with
a capital as if precisely to emphasize the absence of a proper name and
the major place taken by the first wife. Pussy expresses her wish to have
a sundial set up in the garden—an object that inscribes time in space
through the projection of a shadow in the same way that the shadowy
presence of the dead is expressed in space:

“I wonder you never thought of having a sundial before,” she insisted.

“Did Anybody ever think of it?”
“Well, no,” he said, “I don’t think it ever occurred to me.”
 The Haunting House 93
“Or Anybody?”
“No, nor anybody.”
(77)

The insistent reappearance of “Anybody” in the dialogue reflects the

compelling, persistent presence of the wronged woman. She pervades
the characters’ minds and conversations and invades the written space:
a capitalized presence to express her prominence. Like “one,” the
­pronoun “Anybody” introduces ambiguity since it stands for an inde-
terminate subject but can also be all-inclusive. The very looseness of use
and ­meaning of these pronouns make them powerful tools to render the
metamorphoses at play as the haunting spreads and permeates the place,
the people, and the very language of the text. As Pussy becomes increas-
ingly haunted by her predecessor, her questions multiply: “Had—had
Anybody chosen the curtains, too?,” “Did you alone, or did Anybody
help you?,” “Didn’t Anybody choose a name for [the baby], although
he didn’t live?,” “Did Anybody ever sit on that one?” (79), “Didn’t Any-
body ever sit there or go in and out?” (80). The word “Anybody” keeps
reappearing to haunt the text so that the absent one becomes omnipres-
ent, in keeping with the archetypal model of Bowen’s Court where the
dead have permeated the house and its dwellers.
Pussy ultimately seems to metamorphose into the first wife herself
when she speaks in the name of the nameless, silent woman. In the in-
troduction to The Second Ghost Book, Bowen writes that “often the
ghosts are nemesis—dragging buried guilt up, harping on broken faith,
or driving a mortal offense home” (Afterthought 103). The reference to
the goddess Nemesis is particularly relevant as she stands for revenge
and retribution, and she undergoes metamorphosis to escape Zeus: she
takes many forms before finally turning into a goose. In a mock-trial
scene Nemesis-like Pussy voices the first wife’s accusations when she
explains how she would feel if she were in the other woman’s situation:

I should never be able to ask you for things. I should just look
and look at you, trying to speak, and then you would grow to hate
me […] and then I should get ill, and if you didn’t want me to come
back I’d die.
(82)

Like a resounding box, Pussy becomes the recipient of a life and emotions
she has not experienced. She then returns the verdict:

not to want a person must be a sort, a sort of murder. I think a per-

son who was done out of their life like that would be brought back
by the injustice much more than anybody who was shot or stabbed.
(82)
94 Céline Magot
The vengeful words become the expression of postmortem empower-
ment for the silent first wife whose “passivity […] did somehow reach
and enter” Pussy’s life, in the manner of Bowen’s Court’s ghosts
(Bowen’s Court 451). Pussy’s speech echoes Martin’s own recollections:
“All the time he had felt Her watching his face; always on the verge of
saying something…” (81). Now that the air is thick with the deceased
wife’s presence and feelings, Pussy’s accusation makes up for the past
when exhaled, empty air took the place of words: “she would […] look at
him across the fire and sigh…” (78). In spite of Martin’s differentiations,
the fantastic completely merges both women into a powerful whole and
as possessed Pussy has acquired the dead wife’s voice, she clearly sug-
gests that the pervading process has spread to the whole room:

“[…] Suppose we had taken somebody else’s happiness, somebody

else’s life…”
“Pussy, hush, be quiet. I forbid you. You’ve been dreaming. You’ve
been silly […]. Nothing can touch us.”
“I sometimes feel the very room hates us!”
“Nothing can touch us,” he reiterated, looking defiantly into the
corners of the room.
(82)

Martin denies and resists evidence of the haunting with renewed

strength; the use of “nothing” again deprives his first wife of her iden-
tity and turns her into an object, which in fact unwittingly reveals the
truth since she has become “the very room” they are sitting in. Martin
attempts once more to impose his own perspective and sense of hierar-
chy by diminishing Pussy (“You’ve been silly’) and trying to silence her
authoritatively. However, in a last instance of dramatic irony the text
reveals what the character wants to hide: when Martin stares “defiantly”
into the shadowy corners he is obviously aware of the commanding pres-
ence that has spread everywhere in the haunting house, for one can only
be defiant to power.
The “shadowy third” of the title is not an unsubstantial spirit, nor is it
simply the deceased wife who comes back in the form of a ghost. Instead
the dead takes on various shapes and identities in a constant process of
metamorphoses. Her haunting spreads to all the animate and inanimate
entities (the house, furniture, objects, plants, and people) to become an
almighty, all-encompassing presence. In the text itself she materializes
as the shadowy third-person pronoun She—italicized, slanted like a pro-
jected shadow, and capitalized as if to assert her capital importance in
the story—then she reappears in the unspecific, universal “Anybody,”
to find one of her many embodiments in Pussy’s voice and become “I.”
The first wife’s feelings and emotions live on within Pussy so that haunt-
ing becomes an instrument of reassertion for both dominated women.
 The Haunting House 95
Pussy’s ventriloquism is mirrored by the ghostly narrative that creates
dramatic irony and undermines the textual authority of the focal male
character as well as the temporal, social, and symbolic order that he at-
tempts to preserve. Like the haunting, the counter-narrative is an under-
lying presence that spreads in an underground metamorphic movement
to create a fluid world.

Notes
1 The opening story of Encounters, “Breakfast,” reveals the tension beneath
cordial, mundane conversations by paralleling daily items and said antago-
nism: “the coffee and the bacon and the hostility” (Bowen, Collected Stories
20). “The Return” depicts a servant’s secret resentment for the couple she
waits upon, to the point that she has a fantasy of murdering them. Hidden
spite and contempt are also at the heart of “The New House” and “The
Lover.”
2 The influence of Bowen’s Court on fictitious houses can be noticed even
before the publication of its story and even in narratives and settings that
are largely realistic, like the “pre-inhabited” estate in The Last September
(1929). As Maud Ellmann qualifies it: “The house is ‘pre-inhabited,’ not
only by the ancestors whose portraits loom over the dinner-table, but more
assertively by Lois’s mother Laura, Sir Richard’s sister, who died young
‘without giving anyone notice of her intention’” (Ellmann 59).
3 The pattern is reminiscent of precursors like Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries
of Udolpho (1794) and also of later novels such as Rebecca by Daphne du
Maurier (1938).
4 The slang sense of the word was in use as early as the late seventeenth cen-
tury according to The Oxford English Dictionary, and came into more fre-
quent use during the late nineteenth century.
5 The Second Ghost Book (1952) is an anthology of ghost stories by various
writers. Elizabeth Bowen first published her story “Hand in Glove” in it and
wrote a general introduction to the book. This introduction is reproduced in
Afterthought.
6 In his 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” Freud uses Schelling’s definition of the
uncanny as what “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to
light” (345). For Martin the thimble-case is a remnant from a past he wants
both to hide and to forget.
7 My translation: “Lorsqu’un être disparaît, il devient, dit-on, une ‘ombre.’ Au
moment même où on le porte en terre, il se rend capable d’être partout ailleurs,
d’envahir jusqu’à l’air que nous respirons : hantise” (Didi-Huberman 114).
8 In two later ghost stories by Bowen, the air is clearly saturated with the
presence of a ghostly past as the characters breathe in “dead air” (“Look at
All Those Roses,” Collected Stories 514) that may even become animated:
“Dead air came out to meet her as she went in” (“The Demon Lover,” Col-
lected Stories 661).

Works Cited
Armitt, Lucie. Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Fantastic. Macmillan,
2000.
———. Twentieth-Century Gothic. U of Wales P, 2011.
96 Céline Magot
Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of
the Novel: Still Lives. St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
Bowen, Elizabeth. Afterthought: Pieces about Writing. Longmans, 1962.
———. Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters. 1942–43. Vintage, 1999.
———. Collected Stories. 1980. Vintage, 1999.
———. Early Stories: Encounters and Ann Lee’s. Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
———. The Heat of the Day. 1949. Vintage, 1998.
———. The Hotel. U of Chicago P; Reprint edition, 2012.
Corcoran, Neil. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. Oxford UP, 2004.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Génie du Non-lieu : Air, Poussière, Empreinte, Hantise.
Minuit, 2001.
Ellmann, Maud. Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page. Edinburgh
UP, 2003.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14. Translated by
James Strachey, Penguin, 1985.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Methuen, 1981.
Munford, Rebecca, and Melanie Waters. Feminism and Popular Culture. Inves-
tigating the Post-Feminist Mystique. Rutgers UP, 2004.
Murphy, Patricia. The New Woman Gothic. Reconfigurations of Distress. U of
Missouri P, 2016.
Phillips, Terry. “The Rules of War: Gothic Transgression in First World War
Fiction.” Gothic Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2000, pp. 232–244.
7 Obscene, Grotesque, and
Carnivalesque
Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-
Mist as Menippean Satire
Jean Mills

Hope Mirrlees’s 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist, about the scandalous

­banishment of the Faerie folk by law-abiding conventional inhabitants of
the town Lud-in-the-Mist, is sometimes characterized as “high ­fantasy”
in the manner of J.R.R. Tolkein’s later, but more celebrated, work, The
Hobbit (1937), for its “hobbit-ish” sounding names and settings.1 Per-
haps, too, it is often assumed to lean that way because Mirrlees also
coincidentally penned another obscure-but-brilliant text, Paris: A Poem
(1919), published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, written in what
scholars consider a “high Modernist” style. 2 But, “high” can sometimes
be too easy a critical reach, and, in the case of Lud-in-the-Mist, it’s de-
cidedly misleading.
“High fantasy” as a designation, according to Rosemary Jackson in
Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981), often reveals a “nostalgic
humanistic vision,” which seeks to construct “superior alternate ‘sec-
ondary’ worlds,” fantasy as mere escapism (153, 1). In his 1939 lecture
“On Fairy Stories,” another generic association sometimes assigned to
Lud, Tolkein argues that “the Consolation of the Happy Ending” or
the “Eucatastrophe” as he calls it, is “the true form of fairy-tale, and its
highest function” (13). Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist, while a story
about fairies written by a woman, despite Tolkein’s reminder that fairy
tales “are made by men not fairies,” adheres to none of his criteria, nor
does it conform to a definition of “high fantasy” as it has none of high
fantasy’s epic grandeur and makes no bid to create “superior, alternate
‘secondary,’ worlds” as noted by Jackson, above (1).
When first published, Lud-in-the-Mist garnered scant, albeit positive,
attention with a review in Mirrlees’s Cambridge college publication,
Newnham’s Thersites, calling it both “a fairy story with a profound
moral and psychological significance” (HM Papers) and an allegory in
the vein of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) or The Faerie Queene (1590). The
novel, since its resurrection with a Ballantine Books reprint in 1970 and
subsequently as part of The Victor Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks Series
in the early 2000s, is now considered a cult classic, and often cited as an
important influence in fantasy circles. And yet, Lud-in-the-Mist contin-
ues to befuddle and defy categorization. Neil Gaiman in his Foreword to
98 Jean Mills
the Gollancz edition writes, the novel “begins as a travelogue or a history,
becomes a pastorale, a low comedy, a high comedy, a ghost story and
a detective story,” but his characterization suggests a sequential nature
to the unfolding of these forms which isn’t present, and none of these
aspects predominate or could be suggested to form a significant thread
(8). Farah Mendlesohn, in Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), calls the novel a
part of her “fuzzy set,” arguing that, “Lud-in-the-Mist exists at the very
edge of the turn from fancy to fantasy” and her reading of the novel as
“irresolute” points to its resistance to generic categorization (184).
My aim in this chapter is threefold: first, to investigate how aspects
of the tradition of menippean satire, with its links to the fantastic, in
particular its tropes of the obscene, grotesque, and carnivalesque, reveal
themselves in the novel. I am not trying to resolve all of the generic ques-
tions associated with Lud but to point out that its menippean aspects
are essential to Mirrlees’s literary and political project and are not to be
dismissed or undervalued. Second, I want to argue that by writing Lud-
in-the-Mist as a menippea, Mirrlees is able to don an authorial mask,
casting herself as fairy, that is, as heretic and blasphemer, in conflict
with the cultural, social, and sexual norms she encountered in her own
contemporary moment.3 The novel, in addition to making a contribution
to menippean satire, illustrates a queer social imaginary, a “what-if”
world and subversive space of inclusion, embrace, and acceptance of
self, which Mirrlees, herself, as the lesbian, dissident daughter of a
British imperialist father and a Scottish aristocratic mother, struggled
with and rarely experienced.4 Specifically, Mirrlees uses the novel to
express many of the real-life carnivalesque aspects of her intimate,
eighteen-year ­relationship with her mentor and companion, Cambridge
Classicist and public intellectual, Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928).
Both Harrison’s internationally recognized reputation for interpreting
Greek ritual from a feminist perspective as well as her example as a
leftist pacifist who promoted “sapphism,” often provoked controversy,
publicly expressed hostility, and scandal throughout their lives together.
Lastly, my aim is to trace the menippean current in the novel not only
to Mirrlees’s friendship and collaboration with Russian folklorist and
satirist, Alexei Remizov (1877–1957) and his wife Serafima Dovgello,
while she composed the novel in Paris in 1924, but also to Harrison,
whose long-standing interests in Russian folklore, leftist politics, and
theoretical positions on heresy were shared by Hope Mirrlees. 5
In other words, I am characterizing Mirrlees’s turn toward fantasy,
as menippean in spirit and aspect, and as a process, one begun much
earlier with Jane Harrison, who, by Hope’s own admission, re-invented
her. “Influence” she once wrote in her unfinished biography of Harrison,
“was hardly the word of her effect on me. It was, rather, re-­creation”
(JH Papers). The novel, when read as menippean satire, becomes an
­attempt to acknowledge and articulate a foundational, queer, and
 Obscene, Grotesque, and Carnivalesque 99
heretical relationship between herself and Jane, and curiously a totemic
teddy-bear, they each referred to as “the O.O.” or “Old One.” Adopting
and adapting political positions from both Harrison and the Remizovs,
Lud-in-the-Mist, as menippea, advocates for the integration of the queer
self into the body as a whole and into the body politic of the state, fully
acknowledged, fully realized, intact.

“Wifey Bear” and “the Old One”: The Menippean

Carnivalesque, or Queer Codes to Live By
The definition of menippean satire I am using here is based upon Mikhail
Bakhtin’s reconsideration of the genre as part of the seriocomic line of
­literary development, which he outlines in Problems of ­Dostoevsy’s
­Poetics (1972). Although named after third century Greek satirist and
cynic, Menippus, none of whose works survived, the menippea is ­t ypically
traced to the Roman, Varro, whose Saturae Menippeae was a mixture
of verse and prose, as distinguished from the more closed, ­traditional
forms of epic and tragedy. It seems fitting, too, that a genre dependent
on the bawdy, earthy antics of burlesque and the rapid, comic flux of
the carnivalesque, would be based on a misinterpretation. ­According
to Joel C. Relihan, Roman rhetorician Quintillian “does not refer to a
genre known as Menippean satire” and notes that “there is no specific
ancient reference to any such genre” (227). Nevertheless, as he argues,
“the genre which modern literary acumen has uncovered and named on
its own” evolved and persisted to the point where it has become a generic
norm both for classical and modern scholars (227).6 Bakhtin follows
menippean forms from their Greek and Roman roots to a cataloguing
of its distinguishing attributes, noting that it shares a “deep bond with
carnivalistic folklore”7 and “a carnival sense of the world” (107).8 The
carnivalesque as a literary mode uses humor and chaos to subvert and
test a dominant, more respected style, but Bakhtin traces this style to
the carnival, itself, a performance or ritual spectacle that insists upon
everyone’s participation.
While it may not often be critically productive to make such claims of
connection between text and author biography, in Mirrlees’s case, these
are worth noting, due to her participation in and embrace of the carniva-
lesque in her personal life. As Bahktin writes, “Carnival is not contem-
plated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in
it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect; that is, they
live a carnivalistic life” (122). Lud-in-the-Mist, in menippean tradition,
embodies and plays upon tropes of the carnivalesque, that is, spectacle,
humor, chaos, a parade of circumstances and rituals, which affect all
characters, as all are participants in one way or another in the narrative
dance of the novel. But, Hope Mirrlees and Jane Harrison also lived or
aspired to live “a carnivalistic life,” and to their surprise and delight,
100 Jean Mills
the Remizovs, whom they met in the 1920s, while Mirrlees was writing
Lud, also highly valued the carnivalesque, not simply in the literature
they each produced, but in very real terms, as a lifestyle.
The carnivalistic aspects to Mirrlees and Harrison’s relationship, in
effect, began when Harrison initiated Hope into her cult and ­reverence
for bears while Harrison tutored her in classics at ­Newnham, from
1910–1913. The history of Harrison’s interest in bears, particularly
­Russian bears, and later with the Russian language, paired with what has
somewhat frivolously been referred to as her ­“over-active ­i magination,”
reveals a rich, codified queer life, which Hope M ­ irrlees welcomed, rec-
ognizing in Harrison a shared enthusiasm for m ­ ake-believe (Robinson
238).9 In 1906, one of Harrison’s students, Helen Verrall, gave her a
teddy-bear.10 The bear quickly took on a life of its own, becoming
Harrison’s “authentic plaything” (qtd. in ­Robinson 239, n. 74). She re-
fused to call it a teddy-bear, instead using the honorific Ostin, meaning
“Old One.” While sometimes assuming the guise of Herr Professor, or
the “Great She-Bear,” it mostly went by “The Old One” or “O.O.” in
correspondence.
Harrison’s biographers sometimes attempt to frame her relationship
with Mirrlees in maternal terms due to their marked difference in age
(Harrison was thirty-seven years older than Mirrlees) or to avoid a
discussion of their personal connection with one another altogether.11
Sandeep Parmar, however, in her introduction to Mirrlees’s Collected
Poems, notes that “[w]hile it may not be relevant to Harrison’s work, […]
inquiries into Hope’s writing that take sexuality into account deepen our
understanding of the texts – especially her fiction” and “[t]herefore[,]
the nature of Harrison’s and Mirrlees’s relationship is relevant to Hope’s
writing” (xv). Hope, throughout her correspondence and life with Jane,
became “Younger Wife” or “YW” and “Walrus” while Jane became
“Elder Wife” or donned the honorific, the “Old One” to Hope’s “Wifey
Bear.” As Parmar contends, the imaginary life of O.O., who lived
in ­Harrison’s room, her ‘cave,’ but also traveled with them, took on “a
totemic significance” (xv). The bear “negotiated meetings between his
‘younger’ and ‘elder’ wife, and in part embodied their not only uncon-
ventional but impossible union by providing the ‘male’ aspect of a secret,
fantasy marriage” (Parmar xv). The bear mediates their bond, articulat-
ing an intimacy about which they can never publicly speak, except by
using the language and codes of fantasy, which bring their bond into the
ritual dailiness of their lives.
Mirrlees’s relationship with the Remizovs was also marked by
the ­carnivalesque. Dividing their time between shared residences in
­L ondon and Paris from 1914 until Harrison’s death in 1928, Mirrlees
and ­Harrison were connected to Paris’s lesbian literary networks as
well as the Russian émigré scene. The queer coding in their personal
correspondence continued when they left Newnham in 1914 to study
 Obscene, Grotesque, and Carnivalesque 101
­Russian ­together at L’École des Langues Orientales, and they also
continued to address each other publicly in codified dedications and
epigraphs of their respective works, with Mirrlees often signing her
work with the ­constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, in homage
to Jane. Lud-in-the-Mist also ends with the visual representation of
Ursa Major. While reading Russian together in their “Sapphic flat,”
Mirrlees and Harrison met Russian emigrés Prince D.S. Mirsky, Alexei
Remizov, and Serafima Dovgello in 1924.12 Together they began a mu-
tual, reciprocal literary friendship, and the Remizovs, in particular,
whose own flat was filled with stuffed animals, each of which had
names and ‘lives’ of their own, enriched and helped to legitimize their
carnivalistic life. The O.O., the Great Bear, becomes distinctly Rus-
sian, as they begin to translate Russian texts together for publication
and Mirrlees composes Lud-in-the-Mist.
The Remizovs became part of their inner circle in frequent meetings
throughout Spring 1924, as Mirrlees and Harrison began work trans-
lating a personal, first-hand account of a Russian “Old Believer” told
in common language, The Autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum,
by Himself. For Mirrlees, Harrison, and the Remizovs, the text repre-
sented their desire to promote a “true” Russian voice, and Avvakum is
filled with “these little realistic touches” of vernacular Russian (HM
Papers).13 Mirrlees was excited about being a part of the production of
a text with historical connections to a little known Russian past in a
dialect that had its source in the speech of the people, the language of an-
ecdote, legend, and folklore, and this earthy, common language becomes
very much a part of the rhetoric of Lud-in-the-Mist.
During the translation of Avvakum, the seeds of Lud-in-the-Mist begin
to take hold, and the composition process carries her through a second
collaboration of Russian translation, The Book of the Bear (1926), a
collection of Russian fairytales and folkstories about bears. While work-
ing on Avvakum, Hope wrote to her mother on 24 April 1924 about
Lud-in-the-Mist: “I began a new book on Sunday – the subtitle of which
will possibly be A Story of Smuggling, Kidnapping & Adventure on the
Borders of Fairyland” (HM Papers). While composing her fantastic car-
nivalesque tale, her “What-if” world in Lud-in-the-Mist, she writes in
the Preface to The Book of the Bear of the Russian bylina, “a story of
What-has-been […]” (ix). The bylina she tells us “borrows the easy roll-
ing rhythm” of common speech (Book of the Bear ix). The collection
also includes folkstories by Remizov. Harrison and Mirrlees claim he
writes “fables that have no moral,” a quality that sets him apart from
sentimentalists and puts him firmly in their camp of privileging bawdy
colloquial speech (Book of the Bear x).
The Introduction to The Book of the Bear also reveals the circumstances
of Remizov’s exile. Redolent with menippean aspects of the carnivalesque,
Mirrlees and Harrison write in an anecdote that
102 Jean Mills
When Remizov fled from Bolshevik Russia, like a second Aeneas,
he brought his Lares and Penates to his new home. They are a
­collection of grotesque toys; and wooden birds, plush elephants,
rag-dolls dressed like witches, peep out at one from every corner
of his Paris flat. When one asks him to explain their presence, he
answers mysteriously that he needs them for his work. We sus-
pect that he spends many an hour playing with these toys—making
them enact fantastic dramas.
(Book of the Bear xi–xii)

One can only imagine how pleased they were to discover that the
­ emizovs, too, participated in a carnivalesque drama, a secret codified
R
fantasy life lived out via the personas and adventures of stuffed animals
and toys. The objects for both take on totemic and satirical significance.
However, for Harrison and Mirrlees these objects were used to articu-
late an unspoken intimacy, while the Remizovs used their “Lares and
­Penates,” notably the earthly Greek household gods, not the Greek he-
roes, to enact their political responses to the Bolshevik revolution.
According to Victor Shklovsky in Zoo, or Letters Not About Love
(1923), Remizov established a “monkey society as a lampoon on the
official organizations and committees that proliferated after the revolu-
tion. Charter memberships were conferred by elegantly designed scrolls,
signed by Asyka, tsar of the monkeys” (143, n. 1). Hailing from Saint
Petersberg, Remizov was widely known in Russia as a satirical novelist
and a skilled calligrapher. After the revolution, he was forced to flee over
the Soviet border into Estonia and then to Berlin. His was a “reluctant
migration” but “the crossing of boundaries was truly the operative met-
aphor in Remizov’s life and art” (Friedman 4). In addition to monkeys,
his work featured demons and bizarre creatures, which he used to
enact fantastical dramas mocking the bureaucracy of Soviet Russia
under Lenin. Mirrlees’s bourgeois, conventional capital city, the titu-
lar Lud-in-the-Mist, resonates with Remizov’s carnivalesque monkey
kingdom and their shared disillusionment with aspects of Bolshevism.
Remizov and Serafima Dovgello focused their work and life together
on dreams and what he once described as “the bitterness and absurdity
of folklore imagination” (Remizov Papers). After World War II, and
the death of his wife, he obtained a Soviet passport, announcing that
he wanted to return to Russia, despite knowledge of Stalin’s atrocities
and policies (Remizov Papers). Although he died in Paris before real-
izing his plan, he was soon rejected by a new wave of Russian literary
émigrés, notably Vladimir Nabokov. Friedman’s Beyond Symbolism and
­S urrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art (2010) examines Remizov’s
drawings and “oneiric” storytelling throughout the 1930s and 1940s,
noting that his reputation suffered throughout these decades from an
émigré audience that demanded “clarity” and he is later dismissed as
 Obscene, Grotesque, and Carnivalesque 103
“a writer who draws” (4). Without mentioning the menippea, Friedman
argues that, “the more general idiom of modernist liminality certainly
applies to him,” representing “something more akin to Mikhail Bakhtin’s
carnivalesque, a field ‘where new combinations of cultural givens could
be playfully contested’” (3). Like much of the “underappreciated” genre
of the menippea, Remizov’s work remained on the margins and under-
published for the rest of his life (Bakhtin 108).
After Jane Harrison’s death in 1928, Mirrlees left Paris, severed ties with
Remizov, and, after converting to Catholicism, became increasingly reclu-
sive. But in 1926, in “Some Aspects of the Art of Alexei Mikhailovich
Remizov,” she is his ideal reader, promoting his work to French and ­English
audiences. She describes him as “not really an observer, but a re-creator”
(qtd. in Pamar 80–81), imploring us to remember that “the material of
[his] legends – the language in which they are written, the attitude to
life that they express – though on the brink of labefaction, is still alive”
(qtd. in Parmar 79–80). Although Remizov ultimately felt abandoned by
émigré audiences in the west, Mirrlees somewhat wistfully hopes that despite
the political consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution, “Perhaps it is only in
exile that the Russians have found their home” (qtd. in Parmar 83).

Obscene, Grotesque, and Carnivalesque: Menippean

Currents in Lud-in-the-Mist
As Mikhail Bakhtin points out, the fantastic in menippean satire “serves
not for the positive embodiment of truth,” as it often does in high fantasy
or in the heroic quests of fairy tales, “but as a mode for searching after
truth, provoking it, and, most important, testing it” (114–15). The menip-
pea does not specifically focus on an individual character or even upon a
social type, but is instead a genre of “ultimate questions,” and this frame
and privileging of an intellectual contest of ideas is outlined immediately
in the beginning of the novel (Bakhtin 115). The novel essentially re-
cords the history of the struggle and rift between the fairy folk, who have
been banished, and the law-abiding citizens, the victors in the battle, of
Lud-in-the-Mist. This rift will be challenged, reconsidered, and reshaped,
through a parade of circumstances, carnivalesque, obscene, and chaotic,
whose aim is to implore the reader to also question assumptions and the
prevailing wisdom of accepted cultural, political, and social norms.
The conflict between the fairies and the townspeople is demonstrated,
initially, through Lud-in-the-Mist’s geographically symbolic location,
situated at the crossroads of two rivers, the Dapple and the Dawl. The
bigger river, the Dawl, gives the city its commerce and allows the coun-
try of Dorimare to prosper. Mirrlees writes, “[t]he Dapple, however,
which had its source in Fairyland […] and flowed subterraneously under
the Debatable Hills, was a humble little stream and played no part in the
commercial life of the town” (20). Despite its “humble” nature, an old
104 Jean Mills
proverb reminds, “The Dapple flows into the Dawl” (20). Lying outside
the city’s boundaries, the fairy realm is the land of “the Silent People,”
and when all things fairy are banished, readers quickly recognize it, al-
though it is never described except in retrospect, as the vessel of the
profane, unspoken desires of the rational, conventional townspeople of
Lud-in-the-Mist (23).
Fairyland becomes the ideological site of the townspeople’s yearned
for truth. It is the “Land of Heart’s Desire,” sung about by the Sirens
in Jane Harrison’s epigraph to Lud, taken directly from Harrison’s first
groundbreaking work on Greek ritual, Prolegomena to the Study of
Greek Religion (1903). As Gaiman writes, “Faerie has become, explic-
itly, obscenity” (7). The fruit produced in Fairyland has to be smuggled
over the borders and is “so illegal that it cannot even be named” (7).
Mirrlees creates the name Lud-in-the-Mist in menippean spirit, play-
ing upon connotations of “ludic,” suggestive of spontaneous playfulness
and misrule, as well as on the perennial “Love-in-the-Mist” as counter
to Fairyland, but also as a state under threat, and destined to fail if it
refuses its fairy aspects (Swanwick 67).
In menippean fashion, Mirrlees plays on tropes of obscenity, vulgar-
ity, and scandal throughout the novel. As Bakhtin notes, menippean
satire is marked by a “crude slum naturalism,” by which he means in-
stances of “depravity, baseness, and vulgarity” (115). The menippea is
the province of eccentric speech and behaviors, insanity, hallucinations,
“unrestrained daydreaming, unusual dreams, passions bordering on
madness,” examples of which frequently appear in the novel (Bakhtin
116). Typical of menippean tradition, under this rubric of slum natu-
ralism, are characters in the grotesque mode, which, despite their ra-
paciousness and bad behavior, function as catalysts to unmasking
hypocrisy and deceitfulness. In the novel, the grotesque but legendary
Fairy king, Duke Aubrey, is a tsar-like libertine, “a hunchback with a
face of angelic beauty, who seemed to be possessed by a laughing demon
of destructiveness” (21). According to folkloric legend, Duke Aubrey
goes marauding through the countryside at night, pulling sinister pranks
and committing terrible crimes upon its citizens. In a menippean mock
crowning and decrowning of a king, the Dorimarites rise up, battling
the Duke and his nobles for three days of civil war in the streets of
Lud-in-the-Mist (Bakhtin 124). The Duke is overthrown and suddenly
vanishes, “some said to Fairyland,” leaving the state to the merchant
middle class, who seize administrative and legislative power and “a ta-
boo was placed on all things fairy” (Mirrlees 21). Only legends, stories,
and songs convey Fairyland’s glories, “as a country where the villages
appeared to be made of gold and cinnamon wood” whose “only means
of communication was poetry and music” and the language of art and
philosophy (22, 23). Fairyland henceforth remains, until its imminent
and ecstatic welcome at the end of the novel, on the periphery of our
 Obscene, Grotesque, and Carnivalesque 105
senses as well as at the margins of the physical, geographical boundaries
of the state.
Menippean satire is also known for attitudes attacking and mocking
bureaucrats, incompetent state officials, proselytizers, pedants, bigots,
and hypocrites. Calling it “the ‘journalistic’ genre of antiquity,” Bakhtin
writes the menippea was also acutely aware of “the ideological issues of
the day” and often “full of overt and hidden polemics” of current events
(118). Adopting echoes of the rhetoric of the 1917 Russian Revolution
and its subsequent civil war, which Mirrlees was well versed in via her
contact with Harrison and the Remizovs, Mirrlees repeatedly invokes
“the men of the revolution” to expose their flaws and arrogance (23).
Although Lud-in-the-Mist functions as the law-abiding antithesis of
Fairyland, Mirrlees accuses the new rulers of reifying the same oppres-
sions endured under the Duke in a modified, disguised system of bour-
geois rules and regulations. In a blistering polemic, the narrator reports
that the revolutionaries now in power

were creating their own form of delusion, for it was they who
founded in Dorimare the science of jurisprudence, taking as their
basis the primitive code used under the Dukes and adapting it to
modern conditions by the use of legal fictions.
(23)

One of the leading jurists, Nathaniel Chanticleer, the conflicted, wise-

man protagonist of the novel, remarks upon the suspect values of the
new state: “The men of the revolution” simply “substituted law for fairy
fruit,” gave it “to rich and poor alike” and then claimed “neither Fairyland
nor fairy things existed” (23). Chanticleer’s speech acknowledges the
absurdity of the state’s position when he reassures the citizens not to
worry too much, because “the law plays fast and loose with reality—and
no one really believes it” (23). Nevertheless, people adjust to the new
norms of suppression and “[g]radually, an almost physical horror came
to be felt for anything connected with the Fairies and Fairyland, and
society followed the law in completely ignoring their existence. Indeed,
the very word ‘fairy’ became taboo, and was never heard on polite lips,
while the greatest insult one Dorimarite could hurl at another was to call
him ‘Son of a Fairy’” (23).
Mirrlees’s construction of the law-loving Lud-in-the-Mist-ers speaks
to her own and Jane Harrison’s leftist political ideals, and of their disen-
chantment with a post-revolutionary land where “tabulation of results […]
almost absorbed the whole life of the country” (Mirsky 16). Michael
Swanwick is dismissive of readings that account for Mirrlees’s interests
in the political climate of her day. He notes that Gaiman also “grumbled”
at Marxist critiques of the novel (Swanwick 74); he describes the “nor-
mally insightful” Mary Beard, as misguided in her claim that the novel
106 Jean Mills
deals with “fundamental questions of how a society and its members
understand their own history, and how they make sense of the conflicts
embedded in social class and political power” (Swanwick 74; Beard 7).
Mirrlees’s relationship with Harrison, whose politics boasted “a dash of
the Bolshevik,” and later with the Remizovs and other Russian émigrés
in their orbit, supports a class reading of the novel, and a generic des-
ignation as menippean satire further supports the idea of the novel as a
“journalistic” genre, commenting on her own contemporary political
landscape (JH Papers).
The pervasive fear of the fairy, of the obscene, vulgar, scandalous, and
grotesque, sets the plot in motion, when Chanticleer’s son, Ranulph, is
suspected of eating fairy fruit. He seeks a cure or, at the very least, re-
habilitative treatment, as he struggles with his own connections to and
biases against his fairy past. When Chanticleer hears “the Note,” the
musical language of the fairies as a boy, he is so filled with fear that he
changes his behavior to one of utter domesticity and conventionality. He
is also filled with dread that he may hear “the Note” again. He keeps this
fear to himself, but when Ranulph commits “the unmentionable crime,”
he begins to confront his own prejudices and assumptions. Nathaniel
worries that “these things” will become public and “the boy would be
ruined socially for ever” (43). The queer is marginalized and suppressed,
throwing Ranulph, and by extension, his father, into a crisis of identity
and an examination of the ideas that led them there.
Chanticleer seeks help from the doctor, Endymion Leer, another
menippean odd fellow, “a little rotund man of about sixty, with a snub
nose, a freckled face, and with one eye blue and the other brown,” whose
arrival in Lud-in-the-Mist fosters gossip and suspicion among the con-
ventional townspeople (43). He has aspects as well of grotesquerie, as
no one likes him much. The townspeople “considered him apt to be
disrespectful, and his humour had a quality that made them vaguely
uncomfortable” (41–42). Leer is inappropriate, vulgar, and manipula-
tive, but people in the town are forced to use him as their doctor be-
cause he is highly skilled. Leer sends Ranulph to the Widow Gibberty’s
farm for rehabilitation, a somewhat suspicious treatment plan for the
expulsion of fairy effects from one’s soul as the farm abuts the border of
Fairyland. Chanticleer, with few options, allows him to go accom-
panied by a caretaker, who reports back to Chanticleer in a series of
letters about Ranulph’s progress and the strange goings-on at the farm.
As Bakhtin writes, menippean satires often include the use of mysterious
citations and “inserted genres: novellas, letters, oratorical speeches […]
with varying degrees of parodying” (118). Contributing to the chaos,
some of the letters are interrupted or go unread, creating comical misun-
derstandings. It isn’t until fairy incidents accumulate in Lud-in-the-Mist,
a trend that the policeman Mumchance tries to point out to Chanticleer,
that the town leaders officially take notice.
 Obscene, Grotesque, and Carnivalesque 107
Mirrlees also includes “elements of social utopia incorporated in the
form of dreams or journeys to unknown lands,” an aspect of the genre
that Rosemary Jackson also notes in writing of fantasy’s connections to
the menippea (Bakhtin 114). Menippean satire, she reminds us, “broke
the demands of […] probability” and, moving between worlds, “conflated
past, present, and future, and allowed dialogues with the dead” (14). In the
novel, Mirrlees’s Portunus, a fairy fiddler, has been dead for over a hundred
years, but appears in the present, playing key roles in bringing Lud’s
fairy past forward to be tested and grappled with by the citizenry. Both
Portunus and his fairy sidekick, Willy Wisp, whose pranks were the “plague
of the town,” turn the girls at Miss Primrose’s Academy into fairy converts
(43–44). The headmistress Miss Primrose, who carries a torch for the long
dead, but ubiquitous leader, Duke Aubrey, brings them in as tutors. Wisp
teaches the girls dance while Portunus plays the fiddle, whipping them
into a fairy-frenzy, seduced by the alluring Siren song of Portunus’s music.
The scene is rife with Jane Harrison’s research into Greek ritual and the
Year-Spirit, or Dionysian Young God, who is worshipped by his thiasos,
young female maenads who wildly dance and chant him into existence.
In Mirrlees’s novel, a figure dressed in woodland green, wearing a black
mask magically appears in the middle of the round, and as the girls dance,
Moonlove, Master Ambrose Honeysuckle’s daughter, espies that the figure
has a hump and we are meant to assume that it is none other than the long
dead, exiled king of the fairies, Duke Aubrey.
As noted, in Bakhtin’s estimation of the carnivalesque, the perfor-
mance, the pageantry of the carnival is communal, “everyone is an ac-
tive participant” (122). The metaphor of the Dapple flowing into the
Dawl points to this kind of shared communal living history, and we see
the participation in aspects of pageantry, spectacle, and performative
utterances played out throughout the novel as well. As the plot unfolds,
Chanticleer’s reputation suffers and he is dismissed from his post and
found to be “dead in the eye of the law” (133). When he’s censured by
the senators, Mirrlees mocks male vanity and the spectacle of the per-
formance of the court:

Once the senators had donned their robes of office and taken their
places in the magnificent room reserved for their council, their whole
personality was wont to alter, and they would cease to be genial,
easy going merchants who had known each other all their lives, and
become grave, formal, even hierophantic in manner.
(133)

They would abandon “the colloquial” and “adopt the language of their
forefathers,” the language of the state (133).
As he becomes increasingly in touch with his own fairy self,
Chanticleer pleads with the senate to see reason. He contends that “We
108 Jean Mills
have been asleep for many centuries, and the Law has sung us lulla-
bies” (134). He insists, “the time has come when it behoves [sic] us to
look facts in the face—even if these facts bear a strange likeness to
dreams” (134). He proclaims “Away, then, with flimsy legal fictions!”
(134). He implores them to call things by their proper names, not their
euphemisms, “not grograine or tuftafitty, but fairy fruit!” (134). He is
forthwith stripped of his title. His loss of status, however, allows him to
continue, in menippean fashion, a covert operation, affording him “free
and familiar contact among people,” uncovering the falsehoods afoot in
Lud (Bakhtin 123). By the middle of the narrative, readers realize they are
in the midst of a detective story, yet another example of Mirrlees’s menip-
pean signature of incorporating genres within genres (Bakhtin 123).14
The scandalous scenes in the novel, in addition to pointing to the menip-
pean tradition, also resonate with scandals associated with Jane Harrison’s
controversial research. In another instance of an “inserted genre,” Mir-
rlees writes of a mysterious book published in Dorimare by an anony-
mous Winckelmann, Traces of Fairy in the Inhabitants, Customs, Art,
Vegetation and Language of Dorimare (Bahktin 118). While the name
Winckelmann is taken directly from Johann Joachim Winckelmann
(1717–1768), a German founding father of archaeology, the content
of his research emerges from Jane Harrison. Working with a group of
scholars known as The Cambridge Ritualists, Harrison focused on ritu-
als represented in Greek mythology, which she considered as being based
on religious practice, the dromenon, or “the thing done,” rather than as
a collection of myths made up to entertain. By studying the narratives
depicted on Greek vase fragments, material artifacts from the past, she
theorized a discourse on Greek religion from a feminist perspective, as
most rituals were initiated or presided over by women. The fictional-
ized Winckelmann argues that, “the fantastic scenes [on tapestries] were
taken from the rituals of the old religion” (25). Winckelmann also notes
linguistic “survivals” in Dorimare place names and oaths as evidence of
cultural history, locating his approach squarely in the vein of Harrison’s
research, which used a similar methodology and theoretical frame.
Echoing her work, Winckelmann insists, “all artistic types, all ritual
acts, must be modeled on realities; and Fairyland is the place where what
we look upon as symbols and figures actually exist and occur” (25).
Winckelmann’s claim of abundant fairy influence in Dorimare leads
to an immediate hostile response from the townspeople. The printer is
heavily fined, the author is unable to be located or identified, other than
being described as “a rough, red-haired lad,” and all copies of the book
are burned (25). Winckelmann is later revealed to be none other than the
doctor, Endymion Leer, who will be at the center of yet another scandal,
arrested and tried for smuggling the obscene fruit into town. But he also,
in menippean style, delivers a diatribe that points out the hypocrisies of
the state and acts ultimately as the catalyst for the townspeople to accept
 Obscene, Grotesque, and Carnivalesque 109
the Fairies into their city. His speech before the Judges of Lud, who have
condemned him to “ride on Duke Aubrey’s wooden horse,” or the gal-
lows, proclaims that “some day, perhaps, […] the lord of life and death, of
laughter and tears, will come dancing at the head of his silent battalions
to make wild music in Dorimare,” thus signifying the dawn of a new way
of thinking and living in a fully integrated Dorimare (209).
It is a world in which the policeman, Mumchance, can burst into Guild-
hall at the end of the novel “his eyes almost starting out of his head with
terror, with the appalling tidings that an army of Fairies had crossed the
Debatable Hills,” and their leader isn’t worried in the least (232). Instead,
he rises to his feet and defies tradition, proclaiming “for the first time […]
we’re going to “partake […] of… fairy fruit!” (232). The as-yet-to-be created
communal world is about to sing itself into existence. Nathaniel Chanticleer
is possessed of “a new hope” (237); the citizens of Lud open their gates to
the fairies, and, at the close of the novel, prepare to let them in.
Ultimately, the genre of menippean satire allows Mirrlees to articulate
both her queer and sociopolitical positions. The carnivalesque lifestyle
she embraced with Jane Harrison and the Remizovs finds expression
in Lud-in-the-Mist, urging us not to fall prey to the consolation of the
Happy Ending, but to seek to construct a world where all are affected
by and participating in the carnival, the processes of life, the dromenon,
the thing done. The integration of Fairyland with Lud-in-the-Mist is the
sought after combination and bonding of the body with the self and with
the body politic as a whole.

Notes
1 Michael Swanwick, an early reader of Lud-in-the-Mist, implies associa-
tions with Tolkein’s work when he writes that, “She created rather hobbitish
names for her characters (Florian Baldbreeches, Ebeneezor Prim, Diggory
Carp, Penstemmon Fliperarde, Ambrosine Pyepowders, to mention but five)
and impossibly romantic settings for them, (Moongrass, Mothgreen, the
Elfin Marches, Swan-on-the-Dapple)” (70). His most meaningful contribu-
tion to the discourse is his compilation of reminiscences from Mirrlees’s
relations and his wonderful “Lexicon of Lud” (156–202).
2 Sandeep Parmar, in Hope Mirrlees: Collected Poems, makes associations
between the novel’s “hyper-real style […] to that of her poem Paris” (xxv).
Much of Mirrlees’s unpublished poetry is now available thanks to Parmar’s
edition. Many of these poems, though nowhere near the level achieved with
Paris: A Poem, certainly demonstrate Mirrlees’s interest in fairy motifs.
3 In the short story, “The Zanzibar Cat” (1984), a tribute to Lud-in-the-Mist
and Hope Mirrlees, science fiction writer Joanna Russ unmasks Mirrlees
­herself, initially in the guise of the Miller’s daughter, as sovereign and literary
mother of Fairyland. She bestows a fairy agency and authority upon Mirrlees,
which is codified and veiled in Mirrlees’s novel. Russ’s story, in my view, gives
Mirrlees’s Fairyland its feminist creation myth fifty-four years later.
4 Mirrlees’s mother, Emily Lina Mirrlees, nee Montcrieff, was a descendent
of Scottish aristocracy. Her father, William Julius Mirrlees, cofounded the
110 Jean Mills
Mirrlees-Tongaat (currently Tongaat-Hulett) Company, a sugar manufac-
turing company based in Natal, South Africa. After her mother’s death in
1948, Hope lived at Molenvliet, Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, until the
early 1960s, where her circle of friends included Mary Renault and her lover,
Julie Mullard. For a recent biographical account, see Sandeep Parmar’s In-
troduction to Hope Mirrlees: Collected Poems (2011).
5 In “Heresy and Humanity,” Harrison defines the Greek hairesis as “the
choosing of a lot in life or an opinion” (27). To both Mirrlees and Harrison,
heresy is “an eager, living word” and “only in an enemy’s mouth” does it
become “a negative thing […] a rending of the living robe” (27).
6 Although Relihan finds “no generic use of the term ‘Menippean satire’ prior
to 1581” he argues that “modern criticism has filled in a gap” and it’s a
designation carried on throughout criticism of early twentieth century texts,
whether based on a misinterpretation or not (228).
7 All references to Bakhtin, italics in original.
8 Bakhtin pairs his discussion of its roots to authors of Socratic dialogues:
“Menippean satires were also written by Aristotle’s contemporary Hera-
clides Ponticus, who according to Cicero, was also the creator of a kindred
genre, the logistoricus (a combination of the Socratic dialogue with fantastic
histories)” (113). He points to Bion Borysthenes, as earlier than Menippus,
then to Varro, Seneca and his “Pumpkinification,” Petronius’s Satyricon and
Apuleius’s The Golden Ass as classic examples. He also traces the menippea
to medieval Russian literature, an area of interest and expertise for both
Harrison and Mirrlees and the Remizovs.
9 Harrison’s fondness for “all things Russian” is outlined in her memoir
­Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (1925), published by Hogarth Press.
10 Verrall went on to marry William Henry Salter, President of the Society
for Psychical Research (1947–48). She was daughter of classicist, Arthur
­Woolgar Verrall, and Margaret de Gaudrion, who were both early advo-
cates of spiritualism and automatic writing. De Gaudrion, a well-known
medium, coauthored Mythology and Monuments (1890) with Harrison,
an early work outlining Harrison’s insights into pairing archaeology and
­anthropology with a study of the classics.
11 See Anabel Robinson’s The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison and
­Sandra J. Peacock’s Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self.
12 Serafima Dovgello was a Professor of Art History and an expert in ancient
Russian medieval art; in Zoo: or Letters Not About Love (1923), Shklovsky
writes that she was “very Russian, very russet, and big,” and that while in
exile was as “incongruous in Berlin as a Negro in Moscow during the reign
of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, so fair and Russian is she” (21).
13 For a discussion of Woolf’s, Harrison’s, and Mirsky’s interest in and
­responses to Russian literature and language, in particular their interest in
autobiography and memoir, see Mills, “‘With every nerve in my body I stand
for peace:’ Jane Ellen Harrison and the Heresy of War” in Reconsidering
Peace and Patriotism in World War I.
14 Mirrlees’s The Counterplot (1924) includes an entire play within the frame
of the novel.

Works Cited
The Alexei Remizov and Serfima Remizov-Dovgello Papers. Amherst Center for
Russian Culture, Amherst College, Amherst, MA.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by
Caryl Emerson, U of Minnesota P, 1984.
 Obscene, Grotesque, and Carnivalesque 111
Beard, Mary. “Fairy Fruit.” (Review) Times Literary Supplement. 6 April 2001,
p. 7.
Friedman, Julia. Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Syn-
thetic Art. Northwestern UP, 2010.
Gaiman, Neil. “Foreword.” Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees. W. Collins &
Sons, 1926; reprinted and introduced by Douglas Anderson. Cold Spring
Press, 2005.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge
UP, 1903.
———. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life. Hogarth Press, 1925.
Harrison, Jane Ellen and Hope Mirrlees, translators. The Life of the Archpriest
Avvakum, by Himself. Hogarth Press, 1924.
———. The Book of the Bear: Being Twenty-One Tales Newly Translated from
the Russian. Pictures by Ray Garnett. Nonesuch Press, 1926.
The Hope Mirrlees Papers. Newnham College Archives, Newnham College,
Cambridge, UK.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Routledge/Methuen &
Co., 1981.
Jane Ellen Harrison Papers. Newnham College Archives, Newnham College,
­Cambridge, UK.
Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Wesleyan UP, 2008.
Mills, Jean. “The Writer, the Prince, and the Scholar: Virginia Woolf, D.S.
Mirsky, and Jane Harrison’s Translation from the Russian of The Life of the
Archpriest Avvakum, by Himself—a Revaluation of the Radical Politics of
the Hogarth Press.” Leonard and Virginia Woolf: The Hogarth Press and
the Networks of Modernism, edited by Helen Southworth, Edinburgh UP,
2012, pp. 150–178.
———. Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison and the Spirit of Modernist Clas-
sicism. The Ohio State UP, 2014.
———. “‘With Every Nerve in My Body I stand for Peace’: Jane Ellen Harrison
and the Heresy of War.” Reconsidering Peace and Patriotism in World War
I, edited by Justin Olmstead. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2017.
Mirrlees, Hope. Lud-in-the-Mist. 1926. Cold Spring Press, 2005.
———. Hope Mirrlees: Collected Poems. Ed. Sandeep Parmar. Carcanet Press/­
Fyfield Books, 2011.
———. “Paris: A Poem.” Hope Mirrlees: Collected Poems, edited by Sandeep
Parmar, Carcanet Press/Fyfield Books, 2011, pp. 1–21.
———. “Some Aspects of the Art of Alexey Mikhailovich Remizov.” Hope
Mirrlees: Collected Poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar, Carcanet Press/Fyfield
Books, 2011, pp. 75–84.
Mirsky, D.S. Jane Ellen Harrison and Russia. W. Heffer & Sons, 1930.
Parmar, Sandeep. “Introduction.” Hope Mirrlees: Collected Poems, edited by
Sandeep Parmar. Carcanet Press/Fyfield Books, 2011, pp. ix–xlviii.
Relihan, Joel C. “On the Origin of ‘Menippean Satire’ as the Name of a Literary
Genre.” Classical Philology, vol. 79, no. 3, 1984, pp. 226–229.
Robinson, Anabel. The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Oxford UP, 2002.
Russ, Joanna. “Zanzibar Cat.” The Zanzibar Cat. Simon and Shuster/Baen
Books, 1984, pp. 273–286.
Shklovsky, Victor. Zoo, or Letters Not About Love. 1923. Translated by Richard
Sheldon. Dalkey Archive Press, 2001.
112 Jean Mills
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene, edited by Thomas P. Roche, Penguin, 1987.
Swanwick, Michael. Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Myste-
rious Life of Hope Mirrlees. Weightless Books, 2009.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels, edited by Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins,
­Oxford UP, 2008.
Tolkein, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories.” Andrew Lang Lecture. U of St. Andrews, 1939.
Section III

The Fantastic and

the Modern Female
Experience
Fantastic People
Scott Rogers

During the second half of the nineteenth century, England witnessed a

remarkable interest in spiritualism. This movement was, initially, largely
dominated by male “mesmerists” or “mediums” who often worked with
a female assistant or patient as a part of the performance of spiritualism.
As a result, spiritualism allowed both the men and women perform-
ing it and the men and women who were attracted to it to engage in
conduct that was, often, far outside traditional Georgian and Victorian
norms. While the following may seem an odd fit for a collection of es-
says about women and the fantastic, some brief attention to the gender
politics associated with late Victorian spiritualism might provide a bit
of context for the ways twentieth-century writers deployed the fantastic
in their art.
One of these mid-Victorian mediums—and one whose life intersects
with English art in interesting ways—was a medium named Daniel
Dunglas Home. Home was born in Scotland in 1833 and emigrated
to ­A merica when he was a boy. At some point in his teens, he began
to claim that he had special powers that allowed him to communi-
cate with the dead, and by the time he was a young man, he was
conducting séances at private gatherings. After achieving a modicum
of success, Home returned to Europe and took his show on the road.
Claims about his supernatural abilities are indeed impressive. In his
discussion of Home in After Lives: A Guide to Heaven (2009), John
Casey reports that Home could

alter his body dimensions … Normally five feet ten inches tall, he
grows, on one occasion, to six feet six inches so that ‘there was a
space of four inches between his waistcoat and the waistband of his
trousers. He appeared to grow also in breadth and size all over’.
(372)
114 Scott Rogers
Casey also describes some of Home’s other feats, as recorded in William
Crookes’s “Notes of Séances with D. D. Home,” which had been pub-
lished in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research:

He then held his fingers up, smiled and nodded as if pleased, took
up a fine cambric handkerchief belonging to Miss Douglas, folded it
into his right hand and went to the fire. Here he threw off the ban-
dage from his eyes and by means of the tongs lifted a piece of red hot
charcoal from the centre and deposited it on the folded cambric …
Occasionally he fanned the coal to a white heat with his breath …
Presently he took the coal back to the fire and handed the handkerchief
to Miss Douglas. A small hole about half an inch in diameter was
burnt in the centre … but it was not even singed anywhere else.
(103)

After a séance in 1871, Crooke claims to have witnessed Home making

an accordion play even though his hands and feet were held by partici-
pants at the séance:

In this manner is was physically impossible for him to have touched

the accordion with hands or feet. The lamp also gave plenty of light
to allow all present seeing any movement on his part. The accor-
dion now commenced to sound, and then played several notes and
bars. Every one present expressed themselves quite convinced that
this result could not possibly have been effected by Mr. Home’s
agency.
Mr. Wr. Crookes now said that the accordion was brought up to
his knees and pressed against them. He put his hand down and took
it by the handle. It then played in his hand, Mr. Home’s hands and
feet being held by others as before.
(113)

Other witnesses reported seeing Home levitate out a window (Casey

372). Given these feats, it is not surprising that Home sometimes per-
formed for illustrious audiences: William Cullen Bryant, William
Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Anthony Trollope,
Napoleon III, Conan Doyle, and many nobles. On July 23, 1855, he
performed at a house in Ealing, where Elizabeth Barrett and Robert
Browning were in attendance.
Like many people at the time, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was quite
interested in spiritualism. Her interest should not be snickered at. Many
respectable figures of the day found themselves keenly interested in
spiritualism—an area of inquiry that was, it is important to remem-
ber, potentially a branch of empirical science. Just as alchemy had at-
tracted such luminaries as Isaac Newton, the spiritualist movement
promised to answer many of the questions Victorians had about the
 The Fantastic and the Modern Female Experience 115
relationship between the world they knew and the world they hoped lay
beyond.
To put it mildly, Robert Browning was extremely skeptical, believing
these mediums and spiritualists to be frauds—and often ones with mo-
tives that were sexual in nature, as these séances encouraged physical con-
tact either as a way of invoking a spirit or as a way of providing evidence
of the presence of a spirit. During the séance, Home reportedly contacted
a child of the Brownings who had died in infancy and conjured a “head”
out of thin air. Unfortunately for Home, the Brownings never lost a child
in infancy. Robert Browning pounced on the “head,” which he revealed to
be Home’s bare foot. Home was caught out as a fraud a number of times:
he failed to fool Empress Eugenie (again using his feet); he “dematerial-
ized” a “splendid row of emeralds of great value,” which were of course
not returned by the “spirits” (Casey 374); he swindled an elderly widow
of £75,000, which resulted in a lawsuit that determined him to be a fraud
and ordered him to return the money. If it were not enough that Home
died, denounced by Harry Houdini “as a humbug, a pervert, and a moral
degenerate”—who also “insinuat[ed] that [he died from] syphilis” (Casey
375)—Robert Browning published “Mr. Sludge, the Medium” in his 1864
collection, Dramatic Personae. The poem begins with this:

NOW, don’t, sir! Don’t expose me!

Just this once! This was the first and only time, I’ll swear,—
Look at me,—see, I kneel,—the only time,
I swear, I ever cheated,—yes, by the soul
Of Her who hears—(your sainted mother, sir!)
All, except this last accident, was truth—
This little kind of slip!—and even this,
It was your own wine, sir, the good champagne,
(I took it for Catawba, you’re so kind)
Which put the folly in my head!
(Browning 1–10)

In the poem, Browning transforms Home from a respected medium

to an embarrassment, a charlatan, and a fraud who eventually admits
“Whatever put such folly in my head, / I know ‘t was wicked of me”
(Browning 33–34). Just as Home had attempted to transform himself
into something extraordinary due to his connection with the supernatu-
ral, Browning reveals him to be, in fact, extraordinarily human—and ul-
timately it is Home’s basic humanity that undergirds his appeal. He was
a huckster who preyed upon the desires of his audience to know what
lay “behind the veil,” as Tennyson put it in In Memoriam (1849)—a
poem which, itself, attempts to follow its subject somehow beyond the
human and into the afterlife, only to fail to find any reassurance or
certainty beyond simple insistence that such an afterlife exists (section
56 line 28).
116 Scott Rogers
Home was of course one of many famous mediums operating in
England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the “mesmeric
séance[s]” of Franz Anton Mesmer to the mediumship of Gladys
Osborne Leonard, the spiritualist movement of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries was “the occasion for contests over authority in sci-
ence, medicine, and intellectual life” (Winter 1, 4). Spiritualists were of
course not exclusively men; women played key roles in the history of the
spiritualist movement, often serving as the subject of the mesmerist. As
Amy Lehman explains in Victorian Women and the Theater of Trance
(2009), there are deep connections between the performance of mesmer-
ism and the Victorian attempt to treat it as a new form of science, and
women were often the subjects of mesmeric treatment:

A woman performing in a trance state in the Victorian era might be

found in a number of different contexts: as a professional medium, a
Spiritualist trance speaker, or as the medical subject of scientific ex-
periments on the effects of mesmerism or hypnotism. In all of these
cases, she appeared to enter into an altered state of consciousness
in which she could access and manifest esoteric wisdom, spiritual
entities, or even normally hidden aspects of her own personality.
(2)

Even Charles Dickens—no doubt attracted to the theatricality of it—

took up mesmerism in the 1840s to provide relief to Madame De la Rue,
who suffered from “convulsions of the limbs, headaches, insomnia, and
neurasthenic symptoms including catalepsy” (Lehman 35). One such
subject, Elizabeth O’Key, a young woman under mesmeric treatment by a
Dr. John Elliotson, was the subject of a long report in The Lancet. This
report led Lehman to draw a remarkably incisive conclusion about the
theater of mesmerism (and by extension many other forms of spiritual-
ism): the performance of mesmerism allowed both those being mesmer-
ized and those in attendance to break sharply with social or sexual mores.
Women performing these entrancements were “able to assert and express
[themselves] with unusual freedom, through characters which were either
aspects of her own personality” or entirely other (Lehman 48).
One modernist medium, Gladys Osborne Leonard, appeared to ad-
here to the legacy of traditional Victorian standards of female conduct.
Her biographer, Susy Smith, describes her as perfectly in keeping with
such standards of behavior and demeanor. She was “quiet and tranquil,
forthright, simple and direct. She is gracious, with a native dignity and
kindliness … [She is] poised, wise, and serene …” (Smith 22). In her
youth, she claimed to have access to a spirit named “Feda” in the after-
life: “Feda told them that she was to be Gladys’ spirit control. She also
said she was Gladys’ great-great-grandmother, a Hindu by birth, who
had been raised by a Scottish family until the age of thirteen” (Smith 19).
Smith (an incredibly credulous biographer) admits that there exists some
 The Fantastic and the Modern Female Experience 117
“question of Feda’s real nature,” but explains that although “The idea of
losing her identity in trance was repugnant to Gladys” the two eventually

began a long ‘association’ of a most unusual nature. The Feda per-

sonality and Gladys were friends; sometimes they seemed almost
rivals, sparring for the use of the body known as Gladys Osborne
Leonard. But they were never able to communicate with each other
except with the assistance of a sitter who would relay their messages.
(Smith 20)

Like other mediums, Leonard’s “spirit control” provided access not just
allegedly to the realm of spirits, but also to essentially sanctioned alter-
natives to the expectations of Georgian and Victorian female behavior.
As Marlene Tromp explains in “Spirited Sexuality: Sex, Marriage,
and Victorian Spiritualism,” Victorian séances were often incredibly
tactile experiences:

The darkened parlor of the séance invited and embodied the dis-
ruption of the ordinary. In this space, the linked hands of the sit-
ters violated customary barriers of age and gender, and the intimate
spaces underneath the tipping tables set the stage for more than sim-
ply spiritual stimulation. Faces and knees were caressed while the
lights were out, gentlewomen submitted to be kissed by strangers,
and the most private recesses of the past and present were exposed
to the public eye.
(67–68)

Female mediums who had “materialized” a spirit would often encourage

participants to touch the spirit, or the spirit would expose parts of its body
to demonstrate that it was indeed materialized. Records associated with
perhaps the most famous medium of the nineteenth century, Florence
Cook, allow us to see this behavior quite clearly. Cook, who operated in
the 1870s, materialized a spirit named “Katie King.” King, Cook con-
tended, was “the spirit-world daughter of a seventeenth-century brigand
turned governor of Jamaica” literally bodied forth into the room where
the séance was taking place (Tromp 73). Cook’s materializations were
particularly sexualized. Tromp explains that Cook would lift “her white
spiritual drapery to expose the nakedness of her feet underneath …”
(73). Cook’s feet and ankles were not the only parts of her body that she
sometimes sexualized. Tromp details how Cook wore low-cut garments
that exposed her neck and arms, much to the delight of her male s­ itters,
and that she encouraged at least one sitter to examine “this young
‘spirit’ woman’s bosom,” revealing, at last, that “Katie wore none of
the traditional women’s underclothing” (73, 74). These séances provided
a relatively sanctioned framework for what are clearly wild deviations
from Victorian standards of polite sexual conduct—as Tromp explains,
118 Scott Rogers
such scenes “suggest both the level of violation made possible by the
séance and the confidence in its blamelessness” (74). When we consider
the ways that séances allowed participants—and perhaps particularly
women—to explore the possibilities of female conduct that lay beyond
the confines of traditional Victorian and Georgian strictures, it is unsur-
prising on one hand that Robert Browning would have been profoundly
uncomfortable with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s attraction to these
performances and on the other, that she would have found such perfor-
mances deeply attractive.
The essays contained in this section explore the myriad ways that
authors deployed the fantastic as a means of exploring alternatives to
traditional expectations for women’s behavior or identities. Some accom-
plished this by using time travel as a means of exploring the relationship
between “normative time” and “normative lives,” as Elizabeth English
argues that Burdekin does in her work. Others achieved this, as Mary
Clai Jones argues, by representing the revenge of a revivified Egyptian ha-
rem girl who breaks with even the supernatural stereotype of the mummy
who metes out her revenge on the English to present us with one who
“refus[es] all objectification, consumption, or domestication” by rejecting
the colonial trope that insisted that such figures could be absorbed into
proper English domestic life. Some, as Jennifer Mitchell argues in her
discussion of Radclyffe Hall’s “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” and Virginia
Woolf’s Orlando, explored the limits of representing “queer subjectivity”
in modern English life. Some attempted to subvert existing literary genres
such as the Gothic, as Andrew Hock Soon Ng argues, in order to inter-
rogate the material conditions in which women lived. All of these essays,
in the end, explore how female bodies can be transformed or modified
in ways that render them somehow more than human—and embrace the
supernatural and the fantastic as a means of exploring the boundaries of
what existences were now possible for women in the modern world.

Works Cited
Browning, Robert. “Mr. Sludge, the Medium.” The Poems and Plays of Robert
Browning. Modern Library, 1934.
Casey, John. After Lives: A Guide to Heaven. Oxford UP, 2009.
Crooke, F. M. R. “Notes of Séances with D. D. Home.” Proceedings of the So-
ciety for Psychical Research, vol. 6, 1889–90, pp. 98–127.
Lehman, Amy. Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance: Mediums, Spiritu-
alists and Mesmerists in Performance. McFarland, 2009.
Smith, Susy. The Mediumship of Mrs. Leonard. University Books, 1964.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord. In Memoriam, edited by Erik Gray, 2nd ed., Norton,
2004.
Tromp, Marlene. “Spirited Sexuality: Sex, Marriage, and Victorian Spiritual-
ism.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 31, 2003, pp. 67–81.
8 Marie Corelli’s Ziska and
Fantastic Feminism
Mary Clai Jones

Marie Corelli’s Ziska: Or the Problem of a Wicked Soul (1897) revises

tropes of fin-de-siècle mummy fiction, particularly H. Rider Haggard’s
She, to critique both the objectification of women and the coloniza-
tion of Egypt by linking the violence of patriarchy to that of empire-
building. The latter is particularly topical, as 1897 marks the apex of
The Egyptian Question.1 Ziska emerges one year after the serialization
of Haggard’s wildly-popular She (from October 1886–January 1887),
and participates in the same literary mania for mummy fiction. Nicholas
Daly observes that “[b]etween 1880 and 1914, however, more than a
dozen mummy narratives appear” including popular works by Arthur
Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker (25). 2 These works feature men who
conquer and domesticate formidable women, possess land and ancient
artifacts, and break curses that threaten British masculinity and na-
tional interests. While popular tropes of the mummy tale and imperial
romance often feature vengeful, supernatural figures who wreak havoc
on the English metropolis and its subjects, Corelli’s novel reimagines the
female mummy as refusing all objectification, consumption, or domes-
tication.3 Rather than ease British fears about the consequences of colo-
nization through the recuperation of a mighty female figure in marriage
or destruction, Ziska plays upon those fears in the form of a revivified
harem girl who is never contained, diffused, or incorporated into a tidy
Victorian marriage (or cemetery) plot. Corelli imbues her fearsome her-
oine with ancient Egyptian goddess imagery, such as Wadjet, Isis, and
Hathor, in order to imagine both Ziska’s and Corelli’s own emancipa-
tion from the confines of Victorian gender conventions.
Published one year after the completed serialization of She, Ziska is
the tale of a supernaturally resuscitated harem girl effecting gendered
justice. Several millennia after her lover, the warrior Araxes, murders
her, Ziska returns to the land of the living to exact vengeance upon him,
unknowingly reincarnated as Armand Gervase, an acclaimed French
painter. He attends a costume ball in Cairo, held for European travelers,
where Ziska makes a sensational entrance. Through the novel, she stings,
sickens, and dizzies him into her sphere, then lures him to a secret burial
120 Mary Clai Jones
chamber beneath the pyramids. Trapped in a stone room beneath the
great Sphinx, Gervase finally understands the cosmic truth: he is Araxes
who murdered Ziska, his faithful love, out of boredom. This realization
happens moments before she stabs him, releasing his immortal soul from
his physical body. In a trance-like state between life and death, he pleads
for Ziska’s pardon. While she claims to forgive him, she also binds his
spirit to hers, requiring that he follow her for all eternity. Thus tethered,
their spirits float into the ether, transcending time and space. Corelli’s
use of unclear language reveals her discomfort with complete forgiveness
and unchecked revenge. Ziska simultaneously binds and releases, shack-
les and frees Gervase’s sins and spirit. Unlike the total annihilation prac-
ticed by the ancient Goddesses of Egypt, to which Ziska clearly refers,
Corelli’s blended diction seems to hold out hope for a change in power
imbalances. The vague tone of the ending also recalls the novel’s subtitle,
“The Problem of a Wicked Soul,” questioning whose soul is wicked and
why. Corelli clearly leans toward damning men and colonizers, yet her
conclusion teeters between small hope for reconciliation and complete
destruction of wickedness.
Ziska contains parallels to Haggard’s recently published She; it echoes
the stock portrayal of a European man intruding upon and ignoring
the long-established regional and national culture, the inclusion of an
inherited curse, and the repossession of power from a beautiful woman
found in mummy fiction, particularly in Haggard’s novel. Deirdre Da-
vid argues that Haggard depicts the domination of women and a desire
to control the female body (183). Similarly, Anne McClintock observes
that Haggard’s novels “[play] out his anachronistic phantasms,” which
include a “poetics of male authorship” that is not just about creativity
but also “control over the issue of posterity” (235).4
Readers and critics alike observed the parallels between Ziska and
She so much so that, as Jessica Salmonson notes, “Corelli had been
hung with the sobriquet ‘the female Haggard’” and speculates that “it is
probably true that young women (predominantly) sought out her novels
to achieve much the same sort of thrill boys sought in King Solomon’s
Mine,” another of Haggard’s popular adventure novels. Its similar nar-
rative infrastructure to She reveals the text’s intention: Ziska is a potent
counter-narrative, chronicling the failure of empire and patriarchal re-
lationships. In this way, Corelli makes several significant revisions to
mummy fiction tropes in order to create a proto-feminist fantasy nar-
rative. This intention is crystalized in the conclusion; Corelli reverses
Haggard’s ending, requiring the sacrifice and submission of the hero’s
life and power be handed over to a woman. Ziska reclaims her power
over life and death when she releases Gervase’s soul into the afterlife,
privileging the posterity of women’s generative and inventive powers
over that of men.
 Marie Corelli’s Ziska and Fantastic Feminism 121
Ziska’s Colonial and Racial Dimensions
Nineteenth-century male authors often portrayed exotic women as
powerful and desirable, but eventually conquerable. 5 Bradley Deane’s
“Mummy Fiction and the Occupation of Egypt: Imperial Striptease”
explores how female mummies in male fiction are both monstrous and
marriageable, signifying the nation’s desire to “shore up” the Egypt
Question (391). Corelli redirects the impetus of male authors, making
it clear that the female heroine will not be bound by traditional no-
tions of marriage and will not be contained by traditional Victorian
gender norms. Corelli’s revision of the mummy narrative to privilege its
supernatural African femme fatale allows her to break from Victorian
gender and cultural norms to feature a non-European heroine’s active
engagement outside the domestic sphere, including granting her cre-
ative agency.
Ziska’s first description in the novel shows “a face fair as a lily,” yet
her hair and eyes are black as night (52). Like Ayesha, the white African
queen of Haggard’s She, Ziska has light skin; indeed, in the beginning,
ball attendees mistakenly believe Ziska is Russian nobility. As the novel
develops, however, Ziska’s skin tone suggests a lack of blood circulation
rather than a specific race. Ziska’s periodic vocalizations about her in-
timate knowledge of Egypt paired with her desire for vengeance offer
a clear critique of men’s depictions of women and “native” people as
objects to be consumed and possessed.
The change in setting introduces Ziska’s new vantage point on other
mummy fictions. Its fantastic revivification takes place in the Egyptian
metropolis of Cairo instead of the imperial capital of London. Ailise
Bulfin claims of mummy fiction:

The typical plot turns upon modern English trespass into an ancient
Egyptian tomb, the misappropriation and removal of a mummy or
its artifacts back to England, and the unleashing of a curse which
sees an ancient supernatural invader exacting revenge in the heart of
the imperial metropolis.
(413)

Fin-de-siècle British readers would have understood this relocation

of the mummy plot as tied to Britain’s unofficial occupation of Egypt
via its ongoing investment in the Suez Canal. Bulfin suggests the rise
in revenge and retaliation fiction, especially the mummy tale and
Egyptian Gothic, can be directly traced to the opening of the Suez
Canal, when Britain’s economic and imperial interests ensured a larger
presence there. Setting the entire novel in Cairo, in the vicinity of the
Suez Canal, amplifies this effect.
122 Mary Clai Jones
Corelli’s choice of setting also allows her to reverse the roles of the in-
vader and the invaded by placing Ziska’s supernatural awakening at the
inception of the “Cairo season,” where a crush of British tourists descend
like a plague of locusts upon the city (11). Corelli spends the majority
of her first chapter contextualizing Ziska’s initial appearance, reversing
the rhetoric of early anthropologists by characterizing tourists as the in-
ferior species. For example, the British become apes, “blandly-smiling,
white-helmeted, sun-spectacled, perspiring horde of Cook’s ‘cheap trip-
pers,’” who mindlessly trample Egyptian sands, while Egyptians, the
“Desert born,” become noble (11–12, 17). Her female, British narrator
disdainfully claims:

We take possession of nations, not by thunder of war, but by clatter of

dinner-plates … we settle ourselves in Egypt as we do at Homburg,
to … sniff contempt on all things but ourselves … we have actually
got into the habit of calling the natives … ‘foreigners.’ We are the
foreigners; but somehow we never can see it.
(18)

Corelli’s explicit reference to Thomas Cook, credited for making tour-

ism popular in Egypt through a series of travel guides, suggests that the
British traveler comes to consume exotic sights and images quickly and
comfortably with disregard for the ancient history and culture of one of
the world’s most advanced civilizations.6
In other words, Corelli uncovers the British tourists’ colonizing impe-
tus in their rush to “do” Egypt. This nineteenth-century tourists’ phrase
both suggests seeing the highlights of a destination but also assumes
authority and control over foreign space, land, and materials. The geo-
political aspect of Corelli’s work is also at play in its central villain/
victim: Gervase is notably French. France was the original occupier and
negotiator of the Suez Canal, making Gervase a worse transgressor than
Cooke’s “cheap trippers.” The French used what the British deemed
slave labor to build the Suez Canal and imposed high trade tariffs, while
the British proposed free trade and condemned slavery. Although Britain
criticized French actions in Egypt, they also watched in anxious imperial
competition for an opportunity to reassert their global power in unoffi-
cial occupation in 1882. This context, paired with frequent bouts of déjà
vu in Ziska’s presence, foreshadows Gervase’s violent end.
Corelli foregrounds European travelers’ ridiculous ignorance and ar-
rogance in her exemplary depiction of Lord Faulkeward dressed for the
ball as an ersatz Neapolitan Fisherman. He admits, “‘I don’t believe Ne-
apolitan fishermen ever really dress in the way I’m going to make up,
but it’s the accepted stage-type’” (34). In contrast to an accepted, yet
imitation pastiche costume, she introduces her sexually charged heroine
bedecked in a hyper-authentic Egyptian wardrobe:
 Marie Corelli’s Ziska and Fantastic Feminism 123
—the figure of a woman clad in gleaming golden tissues … with jew-
els flashing about her waist, bosom and hair … and whose beauty …
was so unusual and brilliant that it seems to create an atmosphere of
bewilderment and rapture around her as she came.
(48)

Ziska’s exemplary beauty and clothing force the tourists’ to confront

reality: they are the foreigners, the pretenders, while she is the native.
Her ornaments aren’t artificial costume simulacra—or even part of a
curated collection, displaying displaced artifacts taken from anthropo-
logical digs or stolen from tombs.7
Opening with the striking image of a potent native woman in au-
thentic costume and gems points to Corelli’s Egyptian sympathies, yet
still illustrates the way women’s bodies are routinely plundered by the
male gaze. McClintock suggests that colonized women were doubly op-
pressed in their femaleness and otherness (6). Corelli calls attention to
this double bind for colonized women through her revivified Egyptian
harem girl. She turns typical sexually charged instances into opportuni-
ties to highlight Ziska’s command of knowledge about Egyptian culture
and artifacts. For example, one of Ziska’s suitors comments on her vi-
sual authenticity, noting that she is “the very beau-ideal of an Egyptian
Princess … [the] costume is perfect” (51). He cannot know just how valid
her “costume” is, though she ironically taunts him by explaining she is
“historically correct” and revealing her “ornaments are genuine,—they
all came out of the same tomb” (51). Emphasizing the historical accu-
racy and origin of her attire establishes her possession of them as inde-
pendent of European ownership. As most Europeans would be familiar
with these items via the steady “discovery” and subsequent plunder of
tombs by English archeologists, geologists, and tourists, this subtle act
affirms the provenance of them with the colonized rather than the colo-
nizers. Ziska’s emphasis on authenticity accomplishes two goals. When
she asserts that her ornaments “all came out of the same tomb,” her
costume becomes suffused with deadly hints and threatens the suitor
with allusions to burial. Corelli’s decision to imbue her heroine with
life-threatening capacities, thus, reverses the colonizer/colonial and
male/female power dynamics by putting absolute power and control in the
hands of a goddess-like Egyptian woman.
By donning such traditionally accurate garb, the revivified Ziska as-
serts the right to possess her “historically correct” and “genuine” arti-
cles from the novel’s outset. While the similarities between Ziska and
other fin-de-siècle mummy tales were apparent to nineteenth-century
readers, Corelli’s notable revisions offer an alternate rubric of plea-
sure, one that gives women access to the forbidden expressions of rage,
revenge, and ownership without the taming impetus of male writers.
Aviva Briefel describes the mainstream Victorian conceptualization
124 Mary Clai Jones
of “mummies as commodities in order to avoid thinking of them as
things created and with creative capacities” (264).8 Yet, Corelli’s fixa-
tion on Ziska’s accoutrements instead reveals a reverse emphasis on this
female mummy’s autonomy and identity via her sole ownership over her
material possessions. This small detail immediately reverses the focus of
Egyptian Gothic and imperial romance from a hero’s adventure in pursuit
of power and material possessions to a heroine’s assertion of authority
over her land, body, and possessions.

Ziska’s Revisionist Symbols

Nineteenth-century readers deeply understood jewelry’s signification of
both women’s relationships to men and colonies’ relationship to empire.
Corelli upends her culture’s associations by repurposing jewels to sym-
bolize women’s reclaimed power over their bodies and colonized na-
tions’ authority over their land. Ziska attains and deploys her jewelry
in ways that break with traditional meaning, having resisted both im-
perial plundering and conventional heterosexual commodity exchange.
In place of the strapping, good-looking, young British man who extin-
guishes the dangerous curse on his family from the Dark Continent,
Corelli presents the manifestation of a native who guards her artifacts
from English, French, or male possession. Ziska’s reanimated mummy
body paired with jewels from her sarcophagus inverts images of inani-
mate Egyptian artifacts on display at the British Museum from the mid
to late nineteenth century.
Corelli further revises the meaning of Ziska’s jewelry by imbuing her
broach and hair pin with magical abilities that symbolize her associ-
ation with ancient and awesome goddesses. Anne Walbank Buckland
observes in “Serpents and Precious Stones” (1891) that serpentine jew-
elry had become ubiquitous as it appeared frequently in her time as a
love token given by man to woman. Buckland contrasts Victorian asso-
ciations of snake jewelry with that of ancient Egypt, exploring it as a
symbol of vengeance and power. Many cultures notoriously borrowed
from Egyptian lore, where snakes are both emblems of good and mes-
sengers of wrath (116–18). Considering Ziska’s jewelry within a context
of Egyptian history and legend, it warns viewers of her vengeful pur-
poses, fashioning a terrifying female figure, transcendent, goddess-like,
and stupefying.
Ziska commands total attention, compelling Gervase to look at her.
Confronted with her potency, Gervase claims to “have never been drawn
by a woman’s eyes and dragged down, down,—in a mad whirlpool of
sweetness and poison intermixed” (86). Perplexed by the way her “black
hair, black as night” seems to choke, he gutters “‘I have never had my
soul strangled by the coils of a woman’s hair—in the perfumed meshes
of which a jeweled serpent gleams’” (86–87). When Gervase feels his
 Marie Corelli’s Ziska and Fantastic Feminism 125
soul “strangled” by Ziska’s hair, he also mentions a “jeweled serpent”
nestled within her coils. That is because, as he attempts to focus only on
one part of her to regain some bearing and some power, her body and
objects blend together with catastrophic, overwhelming effect. Instan-
taneously, infatuation and obsession sting him like a bee. The effect is
an “insidious horror … like strong drink mounting through the blood
to the brain, and there making inextricable confusion of time, space,
eternity, everything” (87). In place of conventional pleasure or lust expe-
rienced by men looking at beautiful women, to look upon Ziska is to be
poisoned and paralyzed.
It is not only her glittering ornaments, but her hair itself that draws
from Victorian visual tropes of female evil. Male Aesthetes especially
fixated on women’s hair, from the golden and angelic to the dark and
enmeshed mazes seen in William Hollman Hunt’s The Lady of Shallot
(1833). Elisabeth Gitter observes that women’s hair was at once associ-
ated with “inner blessedness and innocence” and “a weapon, web, or
trap” (943). In contrast to the angelic, golden-haired heroines in other
Corelli novels such as The Murder of Delicia (1896), Ziska’s black-as-
night hair incapacitates those who look upon it. The supernatural pow-
ers that seem to radiate from Ziska’s hair and jewelry fashion a heroine
armed for battle against the men who have wronged her. For hers is the
hair of the femme fatale, and “when not woven into a web or a noose,” it
might “be braided into a serpent” (Gitter 950). Leaping from Egyptian to
Greek models, Corelli depicts Ziska as Medusa, a snake-haired Gorgon
deadly to men who gaze upon her. Ziska’s serpentine jewelry reinforces
this terror. In place of diamonds or heirlooms, she dons a “jewelled ser-
pent” and a jewel-winged scarab glitters on her breast (87). The ser-
pent lodged within her dark tresses conjures the undulating tangles of a
life-threatening maze. Although these pieces were once love-tokens from
Gervase/Araxes, they now signify her reincarnation and her transformed
purpose.
The images of both scarab and serpent point to Ziska’s revivification.
In Egyptian religion, the scarab was associated with Khepri, the divine
entity believed responsible for the sun’s return each day.9 In shedding
their skin, serpents leave behind their old, worn-out covering, and re-
generate a new outer layer. Serpents can be dangerous in close proximity
and usually strike for two reasons: trespass and hunger. Corelli plays
on the dual meaning of serpent, their renewal as well as their paralyz-
ing poison. When Gervase moves near her, he feels there is “something
strangely familiar about her … the gleam of the jewel-winged scarabei
on her breast,—the weird light of the emerald-studded serpent in her
hair” (53). The light in Ziska’s own eyes flash just as her scarab brooch
refracts “lurid” light from her breast, connoting simultaneously her sex-
ual energy and an unnatural or unpleasantly harsh vivacity of color.
Their “weird light” should make observers wary.
126 Mary Clai Jones
Ziska’s gemstones thread through the novel as metaphoric fabric,
playing on both Victorian mummy fiction’s belief in their ability to
hold curses and Corelli’s reconstruction of Victorian gendered associa-
tions with them. When Ziska dances later in the novel, her gems trigger
Gervase’s memory: “It seemed that the jewels [worn] upon her rounded
arms and slender ankles were all love-gifts from me—every circlet of
gold, every starry, shining gem on her fair body was the symbol of some
secret joy” (219). While her gems connote a past “secret joy,” they also
transmute into symbols of female rage, agency, and destruction.

Reversing the Male Gaze

From the onset, Ziska makes it clear that her purpose is not to become
the object of male/European pleasure, plunder, or control. Her presence
is a weaponized magnet for the male gaze, purposefully drawing men’s
vision toward her to sickening and terrible effect, creating collective “be-
wilderment and rapture” in all who see her (48). Very literally, the ef-
fect of her appearance is akin to Pater’s mantra that art should resonate
within a viewer like the flame of jewels.10 Yet, Corelli turns Pater’s man-
tra on its head, imbuing both the woman and her zoomorphic gemstones
with fantastic powers that may be leveraged against viewers.
Looking at her is a sublime experience, striking awe and terror into
Gervase; he cannot help but gravitate toward her. Although he does not
meet his violent fate until the novel’s end, Gervase’s erotic desire for Ziska
is transformed into painful and dangerous sensations much earlier in the
narrative. He specifically experiences her composite image, the “luster
radiating from … the light of her golden garments, her jewels and the
marvelous black splendor of her eyes,” as “sudden lightning” (49). His
combined experience of her appearance supports the idea that Ziska is a
holistic tour de force who refuses to be visually divided and conquered;
each individual element of Ziska’s appearance resists objectifying atom-
ization by working in tandem to great effect. He moves from captivated
to captive. When he “look[s] boldly at her in a kind of audacious admi-
ration,” she stares back, sending him into a vertiginous stumble: “[H]
e felt again that strange dizzying shock which had before thrilled him
through and through” (53). The male gaze, which typically consumes
and objectifies its object, is rebuked by the mummy’s electrocuting glare.
Corelli stages a subversion of her era’s pervasive aesthetic veneration
of the male Aesthete’s gaze upon the female model, as well as the colo-
nizer’s vantage points on the colonized. Despite Ziska’s destabilizing and
sickening physical effects on Gervase at the costume ball, he sets out to
prove his artistic mastery over her by painting her portrait. When he vis-
its her lodgings for their first sitting, she is “clad in white garments that
clung about her closely, displaying the perfect outlines of her form” (125).
Ziska’s garments not only echo her hyper-authentic Egyptian appearance
 Marie Corelli’s Ziska and Fantastic Feminism 127
at the costume ball, but also resemble mummy-like wrappings as well as
the draping crepe of female figures in Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
Ziska’s comparison to wild predators carries similar warnings. Her
body also remains whole rather than chopped into parts and distrib-
uted to collectors, anthropologists, or museum curators. She returns
Gervase’s gaze with “the eyes of a hawk gleaming on its prey,—the eyes
of a famished tiger in the dark” (126). Whenever Gervase comes near
her, her eyes flash to signal their animalistic hunger for revenge. The
jeweled eyes of the serpent in her hair mirror her own unyielding gaze
upon Gervase. She too, wants to consume him, though not for his beauty
or sexuality. Unlike in other mummy tales, Ziska’s body occupies space
she figuratively and literally owns—Egyptian space. She invites Gervase
to paint her within her rented residence, her home turf.
Where standard paradigms might have the female model in a male-
controlled studio as a purely passive object, Ziska controls the physical
space of creation and has creative participation in the way her body
is “reborn” in paint. Gervase immediately struggles to find the “exact
hue” for her flesh: “there is rose and brown in it; and there is yet an-
other color which I must evolve while working … It is something dark
and suggestive of death; I hope you are not destined to an early grave!”
(133). While Gervase cannot detect Ziska’s status as living-dead with
his eyes, his brushstrokes and choice of pigment never match the image
he sees before him. As the paint dries, Ziska’s revivified identity slowly
emerges. Thus, she renders Gervase’s creative powers impotent since he
is unable to accurately portray her likeness on canvas. While most of the
novel’s European travelers speculate that Ziska’s skin tone is the fair hue
of a Russian royal, she continues to assert her authentically Egyptian
ethnicity. In this scene, Gervase’s inability to see her proper skin color is
not only a symptom of his entrenched gendered practices but also a side
effect of his role as colonizer. Unlike Dorian Gray’s portrait that reveals
the wickedness of the soul of its model, Ziska’s purple and withered pic-
ture unearths the evil deeds of its painter.
Gervase persists in claiming he can discover the right hue, that he is
an expert at capturing faces, possessing objects in his view and making
them his own. Yet, as the painted representation of Ziska’s face grows
ever unlike the one she wears, she disrupts his confidence in conquering
her as a challenging object. Gervase turns the canvas toward her, so she
can see his work-in-progress, only to reveal his visual obliviousness. She
rebukes his talent as merely “clever” and critiques his work confidently:
“it is not like me … When you begin the coloring you will find that your
picture and I have no resemblance to each other” (138). Gervase takes
offense:

I am no novice at the art of painting … and much as your charms

dazzle and ensnare me, they do not disqualify my brain and hand
128 Mary Clai Jones
from perfectly delineating them upon my canvas … my passion shall
not hinder me from making your picture a masterpiece.
(138)

Gervase’s inability to accurately represent her suggests his virility as a

painter is waning.
Ziska turns the male gaze on its head, making the predatory viewer
suddenly the object of prey. Her beauty is a device for power rather than
a source of female identity. Ziska’s entire physical construction points to
her refusal to be conquered, silenced, or made passive.11 Her manifesta-
tion of female power and creativity denies the paramount Paterian drive
to experience art’s sensations for art’s sake. Ziska possesses the com-
mand of both creation and creator in her ability to revive and self-curate
for the purposes of destruction and the reclamation of her possessions.12
Her creative intentions go far beyond a desire for women’s participation
in artistic production. While Ziska does possess “the power” to make
men “deeply moved” by her “presence [as a] beautiful [object],” this ef-
fect is not her end game (Pater 282). In place of pleasure, her beauty
causes sickening fever, thereby wielding both her appearance and male
desire against itself.
Gervase attempts a feeble counterattack to her judgment of his artistic
abilities, endeavoring to remedy his existential insecurity by shaming
her into silence. While she has successfully used his identity against him,
he misses the mark in attempting to use her beauty as a signifier of her
worth and value: “It is better that a beautiful woman should die in her
beauty than live to become old and tiresome” (133). Gervase’s assertion
echoes the sentiments embedded in the plot of Haggard’s She. When that
novel’s central female mummy, Ayesha, wastes away before the three
bewildered men, the effect of the flames on her beauty kills one of them
and turns another’s hair white. Ayesha’s lost beauty is equated with the
loss of her influence, leading Haggard to solemnly observe in a foot-
note: “[W]hat a terrible reflection … that nearly all our deep love for
women… depends … upon their personal appearance. If we … found
them … dreadful to look on, though otherwise they were the very same,
should we still love them?” (267). However, unlike Ayesha, Haggard’s
queen who sacrifices her youthful appearance and beauty for the love of
a man, Ziska invalidates attempts to capitalize on her beauty and body
by being both beautiful and undead.
Ziska goes a step further than sitting passively while Gervase paints
her. She not only returns his gaze, she also imbues it with threats of
violence. While Gervase observes “the look of intense, burning, greedy
cruelty” in Ziska’s eyes, which he amusingly claims “is so murderously
fascinating,” he fails to see her as a femme fatale because he is too pre-
occupied with his own rendition of her (134–35). Ignoring the fact that
“her eyes [glisten] and [narrow] at the corners, like the eyes of an angry
 Marie Corelli’s Ziska and Fantastic Feminism 129
snake,” Gervase continues his attempts to shape her according to his
own desire (135). As noted, her serpentine jewels represent her endless
renewal and her lust for vengeance. Now, she even becomes snake-like in
her looks. Her own eyes emulate the “weird light” of a viper. What was
at first a foreshadowing glint has now developed into “intense, burning,
greedy cruelty” (135).

Opposing Models of Masculinity

The only man truly safe from Ziska’s mesmerizing presence is Dr. Dean,
a British academic and historian researching Egypt. Instead of being
attracted to her as merely an object of desire (for sexual pleasure or
imperial study), he reads her jewelry as symbolic artifacts of authority
and knowledge. At once recognizing the “lurid gleam” in Ziska’s “black
eyes” and “[t]he jeweled scarab, set as a brooch on her bosom” flashing
in the moonlight, Dr. Dean admires her for her skill and ability (74).
Initially, he thinks of employing her as a research assistant because she is
“well instructed in the ancient history of Egypt,” and “reads hieroglyph-
ics” (163). Dean’s continued welfare vis-à-vis this femme fatale is made
possible by his role as an intellectual. His nature and training allow him
to clearly and respectfully observe, recognize, and eventually to venerate
Ziska.
He exists in sharp relief to the composite warrior/colonist/painter, who
Corelli conflates into the single character of Araxes/Gervase. Nowhere
is this contrast clearer than in a late scene during which Ziska makes
her final public appearance. As when being painted, she again controls
the environment by inviting the entire tourist group to her lodgings in
Cairo. There, she leads them to a “very old piece of stone carving” dated
from “King Amenhotep or Amenophis III, of the Eighteenth Dynasty”
(195–96). This ancient bas relief depicts Araxes returning home from a
victory, “and coming out to greet him is the chief favorite of his harem,
the celebrated dancer of that period—Ziska-Charmazel” (196).
In this moment Dr. Dean and Gervase feel they have seen a ghost.
Once Dr. Dean recognizes Ziska’s face in the carving, he engages her in
a lengthy philosophical discussion about evolution, reincarnation, and
the afterlife. He vigorously agrees with Ziska that “[t]o the wise student
of things there is no time and no distance” (190). She answers that most
men do not consider the consequences of their sins in the afterlife: “I am
glad you, at least, acknowledge the truth of the life beyond death” (193).
Dean is the first to figure out Ziska’s true identity from the bas relief, and
he is the first to agree with her mystic creeds about reincarnation. While
Dr. Dean is never the target of Ziska’s vengeance, other male characters
who display desire for her experience violent side effects in her presence.
Yet, Dr. Dean confirms a recognition of her creative powers, wealth
of ancient knowledge, and unfair death, sparing him from the violent
130 Mary Clai Jones
effects of being in her sphere. Dr. Dean gives Ziska the freedom and
space to exist as her own creative agent, which sets him distinctly apart
from other men in the novel.
However, Gervase longs to possess Ziska, an impulse represented in
his reaction to the carving’s history: “Mine!—mine! By all the gods of
the past and present—mine! Who shall tear her from me, who dispute
my right to love her—ruin her—murder her, if I choose?” (194–95). His
response reveals a long history of violent love instincts. While Dr. Dean
and Gervase look at the carving, she informs them that Araxes mur-
dered Ziska-Charmazel “simply because she loved him too well … Men
always murder—morally, if not physically—the women who love them
too well” (197). Murray, who is also madly in love with Ziska and the ri-
val of Gervase, questions the truth of this statement. Murray’s continual
attempts to be near Ziska result in nausea, light-headedness, and burn-
ing sensations. While her presence stings those who desire her, Murray is
characterized as “a weak good-natured man,” ultimately different from
men like Gervase (197). Ziska distinguishes between men who “would
probably not harm a woman” and those who feel they have “a perfect
right to slay” those women who dare to love them (197). Through the
contrasting responses of these three men, Corelli displays a continuum
of masculine responses to women, further justifying Ziska’s divine pow-
ers to give life and take it away.

Ziska as Goddess
Ziska’s choice of art and entertainment for her guests further implicates
her divine, goddess-like qualities. Toward the end of her party, unnamed
Egyptian women appear out of thin air and begin playing hypnotic mu-
sic. A veiled Ziska gyrates at the center. She coils upon herself to the
music with mesmeric power over the crowd. This scene is reminiscent
of Haggard’s Ayesha dancing in the eternal flames and of Oscar Wilde’s
Salome dancing for Herod.13 Unlike Salome who dances against her will
and Ayesha who is consumed by the eternal fire, Ziska dances for the
explicit purpose of ensnaring and drugging Gervase.
Corelli’s novel seems to pick up where Haggard’s ends; Ziska is no
Ayesha. At the opening of Haggard’s She, the supernatural Ayesha acci-
dentally kills her lover, Leo/Killikrates, requiring the once-omnipotent
queen to seek forgiveness from a mortal man. Later, when she reunites
with his reincarnation, she is herself burned and transformed. This sub-
mission still does not satisfy the distinctly British and masculine need to
possess. Therefore, Ayesha dies of self-immolation by stepping into the
purifying flame of life. In the conclusion, she kneels before him, pro-
claiming he is the “Lord of All,” physically and verbally handing over
her power to him.
 Marie Corelli’s Ziska and Fantastic Feminism 131
At the novel’s close, Ziska leads Gervase to the pyramids, where he
follows her to an ancient burial chamber. Once there, she rises up like
a cobra before it strikes and stabs him in the heart. The dagger jolts
Gervase’s memory and he recalls their entire history together. He pleads
for forgiveness, though too late to be saved, at least in this lifetime.
However, the novel’s final words, “even with a late repentance Love
pardons all,” leave open some other possibilities for partial salvation
(315). Sharla Hutchison interprets these words as Ziska’s forgiveness
of Araxes/Gervase and argues that this language undermines Corelli’s
feminist potential, seen in Ziska’s “exciting presentation of female sex-
uality and power,” with a reversion to familiar and traditional “ro-
mantic clichés” in the end (45). Yet, the rhetoric of Corelli’s conclusion,
while appearing at first glance to promote a quasi-Christian ethos of
punishing-yet-forgiving sinners, justifies both Ziska’s need for revenge
and god-like behavior.
Ziska alone has the power to give and take life, to punish or forgive:
all godlike provenances. While Hutchison reads Ziska’s conclusion as
recuperating heteronormative relationships and pairings that tame and
contain voracious female power, Ziska forces Gervase into a kind of
slavery, wherein she binds his soul to hers. Just before she stabs Gervase/
Araxes, Ziska commands him to “[t]ake all of me, for I am yours!—
aye, so truly yours that you can never escape me!—never separate from
me” (292). Ziska’s claims that she belongs to Gervase seem to contradict
her earlier refusals to be commodified; this final assertion read in con-
text, argues for bonds of equality in love and life. Her words also carry
threats of eternal stalking. Not only does she simultaneously take all
of him while demanding she is all his, signaling balance, but she also
promises to trap his soul as punishment. Her ritual murder of him, the
conclusion of thousands of years of searching, releases them both from
the curse of vengeance. That done, only Ziska possesses the authority
to pardon Gervase in the afterlife and then bind his soul to hers for all
eternity in a forced equality. The languages of love, forgiveness, and
vengeance are conflated in these final scenes, complicating the idea that
forgiveness is the absence of memory and anger.
Reversing Haggard, Corelli requires a human man to beg the divine
female for forgiveness. Unlike Ayesha, Ziska remains beautiful, despite
being murdered. Rather than sacrifice herself within the eternal flames
for her lover as Ayesha so willingly does, Ziska stalks, hunts, and kills
the man who killed her. No one is capable of disempowering her, via geo-
graphical, aesthetic, or romantic colonization. While Haggard’s African
queen dispossesses herself of power and life, Corelli’s Egyptian hero-
ine gains more agency and power through death. Ziska’s story is about
her revenge upon men who flippantly consume women’s love and bodies
for their pleasure and care nothing for their lives once their conquest
132 Mary Clai Jones
is done. Reclaiming colonized land and colonized women, Ziska reads
from beginning to end of female ownership over body and soul. If we
follow Deirdre David’s claims that Haggard’s romances illustrate the im-
perial fantasy to command women and their bodies, then Corelli’s novel
resists the patriarchal as well as the colonial impetus to possess and
dominate, instead containing and taming the male threat to women’s
bodies and desires (182).
Ziska’s potent perennial rage replaces Ayesha’s centuries of longing
and desire. In place of a fallen native queen who sacrifices herself for
European men, Corelli illustrates heterosexual love as an eons-long
power struggle. She portrays a history of male violence that justifies fe-
male anger. In place of a Western hero who discovers and possesses the
secrets and power of the East, Corelli’s tale focuses on the East’s rec-
lamation of generative, creative, and material possession. She not only
characterizes colonization as murderous, jealous, and masculine but
also depicts love within patriarchal and imperial systems of power as
culminating in brutal ends. Her revised tropes to mummy fiction pro-
pose a new image of the femme fatale, one that not only transcends the
domestic sphere but also men’s and empire’s attempts to contain wom-
en’s creative and destructive powers.

Notes
1 The Egyptian Question refers to political and cultural debates upon French
and Egyptian completion of the Suez Canal in 1869. Ailise Bulfin refer-
ences the following poem in Punch: “We know what seas the work unites,
who knows what sovereigns it divides,” suggesting the question was one
about imperial, political, and cultural anxieties in the late Victorian Era
(210–14). She goes on to claim these anxieties are reflected in the Egyptian
Gothic (412).
2 Daly lists “Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Ring of Thoth’ (1890) and ‘Lot No.
249’ (1892), H. Rider Haggard’s ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ (1913), and Bram
Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), as well as pieces which have almost
fallen out of literary history, such as Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian
(1899), H. D. Everett’s Iras, A Mystery (1896), and Ambrose Pratt’s The
Living Mummy (1910)” (25).
3 It should be noted that Iras: A Mystery (1896) was also written by a woman.
There is a shared interest in jewelry and critique of gender and imperialism
in both novels.
4 Neil Hultgren argues that Haggard’s novels “place stereotypically rugged,
manly and virile Englishmen in uncharted African territories chronicling
their exploits as they encounter lost tribes and beautiful women in the quest
for treasure, knowledge, or hidden civilization” (646). Ziska focuses on a
fierce woman whose power and agency sustains itself through the entirety of
the narrative.
5 The Murder of Delicia (1896) overtly criticizes the societal double stan-
dards for men and women, especially women’s lack of access to their own
 Marie Corelli’s Ziska and Fantastic Feminism 133
property. Even in Corelli’s most famous novels, A Romance of Two Worlds
and The Sorrows of Satan, the heroines are portrayed as transcendent dei-
ties, constantly elevated above male characters.
6 See Robert F. Hunter’s “Tourism and Empire: The Thomas Cook & Son
Enterprise on the Nile, 1868–1914,” and Waleed Hazbun “The East as an
Exhibit: Thomas Cook & Son and the Origins of the International Tourism
Industry in Egypt” in The Business of Tourism: Place, Faith and History.
7 The treasures of sarcophagi were often shipped back to Britain where they
would go on display in museums so that nineteenth-century readers were fa-
miliar with the reference to treasure found in mummies’ tombs. See Tessa
Baber’s “Ancient Corpses as Curiosities: Mummymania in the Age of Early
Travel” and Barbara J. Black’s On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums.
Corelli might also reference the story of Hatasu, a famed female Pharaoh. De-
spite history’s record of her competency as a ruler and her people’s recognition
of her as their woman-king, she became a controversial figure in later history,
especially for Victorians. See Sax Rohmer’s “In the Valley of the Sorceress.”
8 Nicholas Daly also argues that mummy tales and mummies themselves as
material objects become a symbol of changing consumer and material prac-
tices in late nineteenth-century Britain.
9 See The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt by Richard
Wilkinson (pp. 230–233) and The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods
and Goddesses by George Hart (pp. 84–85).
10 See Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance.
11 Linda Lewis argues “Among nineteenth-century British women writers the Me-
dusa is a recurring figure, as is the fascinating woman whose ‘identity’ is created
by the male gaze” (204). For an exploration of women’s dual nature as depicted
by the male gaze in Victorian painting, see Dijkstra specifically p. 285.
12 Kimberley Wahl suggests that “in Aesthetic dressing, the wearer might both
construct herself as a creative work and present herself as an image of Aes-
thetic idealism, in essence synthesizing the subject/object split” which char-
acterizes how women in the nineteenth century experienced viewing art (51).
13 For more on the mesmerizing, yet deadly, sensual female dance commonly
found in fin-de-siècle art and literature, see Dijkstra, Chapter XI, “Gold and
the Virgin Whores of Babylon; Judith and Salome: The Priestesses of Man’s
Severed Head,” pp. 352–401.

Works Cited
Ambrose Pratt, The Living Mummy. Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers,
1910.
Baber, Tessa. “Ancient Corpses as Curiosities: Mummymania in the Age of
Early Travel.” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, vol. 8, 2016,
pp. 60–93.
Black, Barbara J. On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums. U of Virginia P,
2000.
Boothby, Guy. Pharos the Egyptian: The Classic Tale of Romance and Revenge.
Dover Horror Classics. 2016.
Buckland, Anne Walbank. Anthropological Studies. Ward and Downey, 1891.
Bulfin, Ailise. “The Fiction of Gothic Egypt and British Imperial Paranoia: The
Curse of the Suez Canal.” ELT, vol. 54, no. 4, 2011, pp. 411–443.
134 Mary Clai Jones
Corelli, Marie. The Murder of Delicia. J. B. Lippincott, 1886.
———. Ziska: Or the Problem of a Wicked Soul. Simpkin, Marshal, 1987.
Daly, Nicholas. “That Obscure Object of Desire: Victorian Commodity Culture
and Fictions of the Mummy.” Novel, vol. 28, 1994, pp. 24–51.
David, Deirdre. Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing.
Cornell UP, 1995.
Deane, Bradley. “Mummy Fiction and the Occupation of Egypt: Imperial Strip-
tease.” English Literature in Transition, vol. 51, no. 4, 2008, pp. 381–410.
Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de Siècle
Culture. Oxford UP, 1986.
Douglas, Theo. Iras, A Mystery. Dodo Press, 2009.
Gitter, Elisabeth G. “The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagina-
tion.” PMLA, vol. 99, no. 5, 1984, pp. 936–954.
Haggard, Rider H. She, edited by Andrew Stauffer. Broadview, 2006.
Hart, George The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses.
Routledge, 2005, pp. 84–85.
Hazbun, Waleed. “The East as an Exhibit: Thomas Cook & Son and the Origins
of the International Tourism Industry in Egypt.” The Business of Tourism:
Place, Faith and History, edited by Philip Scranton and Janet F. Davidson. U
of Pennsylvania P, 2009, pp. 3–33.
Hultgren, Neil. “Haggard Criticism since 1980: Imperial Romance before and
after the Postcolonial Turn.” Literature Compass, vol. 8/9, 2011, pp. 645–659.
Hunter, Robert F. “Tourism and Empire: The Thomas Cook & Son Enterprise on
the Nile, 1868 1914.” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 40, no. 5, 2004, pp. 28–54.
Hutchison, Sharla. “Marie Corelli’s Ziska: A Gothic Egyptian Ghost Story.”
Monsters and Monstrosity from the Fin de Siècle to the Millennium: New
Essays, edited by Sharla Hutchison and Rebecca A. Brown. McFarland and
Company, Inc., 2015, pp. 29–48.
Lewis, Linda. Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman
Artist. U of Missouri P, 2003.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race Gender and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest. Routledge, 1995.
Pater, Walter. “From Studies in the History of the Renaissance.” Aesthetes and
Decadents of the 1890’s. Introduction by Karl Beckson. Academy Chicago
Publishers, 1981.
Rohmer, Sax. “In the Valley of the Sorceress.” Tales from Secret Egypt. McKinlay,
Stone & Mackenzie, 1920.
Salmonson, Jessica Amanda. “Marie Corelli and Her Occult Tales.” The
Victorian Web. 1998.
Stoker, Bram. The Jewel of Seven Stars. TOR, 1999.
Wahl, Kimberly. “A Domesticated Exoticism: Fashioning Gender in
Nineteenth-Century British Tea Gowns.” Cultures of Femininity in Mod-
ern Fashion, edited by Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth M. Sheehan, U of New
Hampshire P, 2011, pp. 45–70.
Wilkinson, Richard H. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt.
Thames & Hudson, 2003, pp. 230–233.
9 The Fantastic and the
Woman Question in Edith
Nesbit’s Male Gothic Stories
Andrew Hock Soon Ng

The recent and growing scholarly interest in Edith Nesbit’s otherwise-

neglected Gothic tales has primarily resulted in interpretations that
claim their feminist agenda was leveraged to “ruthlessly undermine
­Victorian [gender] proprieties” (Hadji 229).1 Victoria Margree ar-
gues that ­Nesbit’s “horror fiction” demonstrates “the significance of
the supernatural story as a form that gave women writers of the long
nineteenth century a vehicle for questioning the material and social con-
ditions of their existence” (440). 2 Persuasive and undeniably insightful,
this kind of perspective nevertheless neglects the fact that Nesbit’s own
position regarding the “woman question” was at best conflicted. While
she held reformist convictions as a Fabian, a socialist society founded
in London in 1884, and privately respected the suffrage movement, she
was also publicly critical of some of their aims. She even went so far
as to reject the Conciliatory Bill allowing women to vote, dismissing it
instead “as unnecessary and even undesirable” (Briggs xx). Moreover,
she would sometimes delicately parody the New Woman in her adult
romance ­novels, or circumscribe its ideology in her children’s fiction.
Most famously, she satirized militant suffragettes in the character of
“the ­Pretenderette” in The Magic City (1910). Such strategies not only
curtail her fiction’s potential feminist concerns but, in my view, also
render the claim that Nesbit reserved feminist polemics for her Gothic
writings likely improbable, if not impossible. Although it is admittedly
suspect to mount interpretive claims based on scant biographical de-
tails, it is worth noting that Nesbit’s ambivalence with regard to fem-
inism would never be satisfactorily “resolve[d] in her own life,” as she
struggled to find a balance between her role as wife to a notoriously
anti-feminist businessman, Hubert Bland, and her position as a well-
known, financially independent female author in the keenly patriarchal
culture of the late Victorian era (Rutledge 227). 3
The primary objective of this chapter is to examine some of Nesbit’s
Gothic stories from a vantage point that precisely challenges the claims
of scholarship informed by feminism. Here, it is necessary to emphasize
that my intention is not to discount the value of such scholarship but to
propose an interpretive trajectory I believe is more consistent with not
136 Andrew Hock Soon Ng
only Nesbit’s publicly held beliefs about the New Woman and concern
over “marketing her work” to a readership whose majority subscribed
to Victorian values and gender norms but also the Gothic’s propensity
to be ideologically ambiguous (Rutledge 228).4 To this end, I will focus
my discussion on three stories, namely “Uncle Abraham’s Romance”
(1893), “From the Dead” (1893), and “Man-Size in Marble” (1893), all
of which can be read as demonstrating a distinctly anti-feminist agenda.
Guiding my investigation is Anne Williams’s theory contrasting the male
and female Gothic. I draw upon her work for two purposes: first, to help
determine the limited extent of the feminist contours in Nesbit’s Gothic
tales and then to note one of their signature less-progressive “male”
features. Based on the narrative features present in the three stories, it
is unquestionable that they gesture more toward male Gothic, which
would then render their alleged feminist convictions moot. Relating to
this is the second purpose, which is to clarify that the female protago-
nists’ apparent complicity in their own destruction is not ultimately an
interpretation amounting to victim-blaming but a plot feature typifying
the male Gothic. A scenario apparent in “From the Dead” and “Man-
Size in Marble,” its conspicuous disqualification of the heroine’s alleged
designation as blameless victim could also underscore the narratives’
criticism against, not their promotion of, the New Woman.

Situating the Woman Question in Nesbit’s Gothic Fiction

Nesbit’s “reticence on suffrage issues” and oppositional stance on the
woman question that, in part, “was quite likely … grounded in her
­deference to Bland’s anti-suffrage views,” is well recounted in Julia
Briggs’s authoritative biography on the writer (Rutledge 226). 5 That
Nesbit appeared to subscribe to her husband’s estimation of women
is tellingly illustrated when she was invited by the newly formed
­Fabian Women’s Group to speak on the topic of “Motherhood and
­Breadwinning” due to her status as wife, mother, and published writer.
Instead of discussing the subject suggested by the group, she presented a
lecture on “The ­Natural Disabilities of Women” (Briggs 350). ­W hatever
Nesbit’s immediate reason for the switch may have been—Briggs claims
“she must then have lost her nerve”—it ostensibly exemplifies her acqui-
escence to Bland’s sexist beliefs, and therefore to traditional patriarchal
attitudes toward women in general, while her refusal to endorse the suf-
frage movement was likely adopted to align herself with her husband’s
convictions (350). The latter is perhaps most pointedly expressed in her
reply to the suffragist Evelyn Sharp’s letter requesting her support of
the ­Conciliatory Bill: “I am for adult Suffrage, but primarily my po-
litical interest is all for Socialism, and I do not wish Socialism to be
endangered by an ­extension of the franchise to a class of women mainly
Conservative” (qtd. in Moore 244). For Doris Langley Moore, Nesbit’s
 The Fantastic and the Woman Question 137
first biographer, “This very concise explanation savours more of Hubert
Bland’s manner than his wife’s” (244). Nesbit’s capitulation to Bland was
so obvious that Laurence Housman (brother of the poet A. E. ­Housman
and writer and women’s rights activist Clemence Housman), who knew
the Blands, would later write in a letter to Moore that

When the Women’s Suffrage Movement started, she [Nesbit] disap-

pointed me by refusing to take any part in it when it took the form of
Adult Suffrage. I felt that this was a dishonest excuse, put forward,
I guess, because her husband was a violent Anti, and she wished not
to annoy him.
(qtd. in Briggs 151)

Here Housman recognizes the tension between Nesbit’s public and pri-
vate position regarding feminism.
It is curious that scholarship focusing on her Gothic tales would largely
ignore the fact that her stories were directed at the mainstream for finan-
cial gain, and the perhaps paradoxical-but-related circumstances where
Nesbit gave very public repudiations of feminist propositions, yet was
her family’s primary breadwinner. Much of it tends to read Nesbit’s her-
oines as blameless, trapped in unequal heteronormative relationships,
and ultimately victims of indifferent and/or chauvinistic heroes, and by
extension, of Victorian patriarchy—thus betraying interpretations gen-
erally biased toward feminism.6 This is not to say that Nesbit’s fiction,
Gothic or otherwise, eschews feminist possibilities altogether. However,
as Amelia Rutledge asserts, the feminist inferences in Nesbit’s stories
fundamentally never amount to “serious confrontations with issues of
female resistance to and subversion of gender stereotypes,” thus leaving
“potentially serious [feminist] consequences in potentia” (232–33). Rut-
ledge’s subsequent examination of both Nesbit’s children’s fiction and
adult romance shows how their heroines inevitably subscribe back to
heteronormativity in the form of the female child’s satisfactory comple-
tion of her education regarding her gendered social role or the marriage
plot.7 Although Rutledge does not discuss Nesbit’s Gothic narratives,
her observation concerning the circumscribed feminist perspective of
Nesbit’s fiction arguably informs them as well.
Critics’ motivation to underscore Nesbit’s Gothic writings with a fem-
inist agenda has partly to do with the longstanding relationship between
Gothic studies and feminist scholarship. This connection is evident
in Nesbit scholars’ claims concerning her Gothic stories’ exposure of
women’s victimization by men and a male-biased symbolic order that
is consistent with what feminist scholarship broadly alleges has typi-
fied Gothic literature since the eighteenth century when the genre first
debuted. But while there is little doubt that the Gothic often brings into
relief the plight of women who inhabit repressive institutions managed
138 Andrew Hock Soon Ng
by men, such a feature cannot make the genre de facto feminist when
considering its capacity for accommodating multiple, even contradic-
tory, meanings. For Halberstam, this quality is essential to the Gothic
since “part of the experience of horror comes from the realization that
meaning itself runs riot,” and thus potentially explains its efficacy for in-
citing “pleasure and/or disgust [thereby] empowering some reader even
as it disables others” (2, 17). Nesbit’s Gothic tales, written at the fin de
siècle, arguably

capitalized on … contemporary debates about … sexualities outside

the realms of [traditional] heteronormativity and used the spectral
encounter at the centre of the ghost story to address what remained
‘unseen’, unacknowledged, in women’s less than satisfying experi-
ences of middle-class marriage.
(Liggins 38)

They reflect not only the specific late Victorian concerns of women but
also more general concepts of women’s domestic vulnerabilities and mal-
aise, firmly placing them in the literary tradition of Ann Radcliffe’s The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) (Modleski 60).
At the same time, however, it is possible to read Nesbit’s stories like
“The Pavilion” (1915), “The Shadow” (1910), “From the Dead” (1893),
and “Man-Size in Marble” (1893) as sympathizing with the hero while
implicitly faulting the heroine for her complicity in her own tragedy.8
Accordingly, the Gothic in relation to Nesbit’s tales also exemplifies
what Kelly Hurley terms, albeit modified for my purpose, “a conserving
genre” (25).9 That is, its representation of the New Woman somehow re-
affirms, if paradoxically, the identity of the traditional woman to which
the former is opposed, so that the latter is foregrounded at the very mo-
ment she is becoming gradually sidelined.
While the Gothic’s propensity to be ambiguous admittedly compro-
mises full loyalty to any particular ideology, it is nevertheless possible to
establish whether Nesbit’s stories are predisposed to feminist concerns
by determining if they belong to the male or female Gothic. According
to the theoretical framework developed by Anne Williams, what con-
stitutes male Gothic narratives is a patent discrimination against the
heroine, who is usually represented as an innocent victim trapped in the
labyrinthine home of a punishing father-figure to symbolize ­women’s
subjugation by an authoritative patriarchal symbolic order. In such
texts, death or a monastic life is the fate commonly afforded to her as
punishment for destabilizing this hegemony and, by extension, to signal
its recuperation. Notably, Williams’s male Gothic is also closely aligned
with the restrictive, repressive, and ultimately destructive ­Lacanian
male gaze that jealously guards its boundary against violation, whether
by the self or an other. Unsurprisingly, transgression against it almost
 The Fantastic and the Woman Question 139
always “lead[s], eventually, to punishment,” often in the form of total
annihilation (Williams 144).
Of special interest to this discussion is the relationship between the
gaze and the supernatural in Williams’s theory. In male Gothic, the su-
pernatural is perceived as a threat that compels its removal from the he-
ro’s visual landscape. Here, a woman’s association with the supernatural
invariably establishes her as a menace that must be destroyed or relegated
to a “realm far beyond us” (Williams 145).10 However, in female Gothic,
the supernatural figuratively encourages the heroine to effect what can
be compared to Kaja Silverman’s concept of the “productively remem-
bering look,” whose aim is to displace the ego through conscious and
constant reworking of the terms under which we would otherwise un-
consciously relate to the objects populating our visual landscape (184). It
is a mode of gazing, in other words, that is cognizant of the self’s ­visual
tendency to either incorporate otherness into the self or repudiate it,
and as such, would always attempt to “see again” but “differently” the
second time around. This would then prevent otherness from becoming
relegated to the unconscious by the ego-subject, but would “[open] up …
the unconscious to otherness” instead and thereby displace the ego
­(Silverman 184). In short, the supernatural in female Gothic encourages
gazing that is expansive and other-centric, as opposed to male Gothic’s
representation of the phenomenon, which confines the gaze within its
egocentric borders.
Admittedly not without shortcomings, one of which is the inflexibil-
ity that results in its failure to account for plot variations, Williams’s
division of the Gothic according to gender is nonetheless useful as a
framework for this discussion. As my argument in the following two
sections will make apparent, the narrative features expressed in three
select tales clearly incline them more toward male Gothic, which in turn,
would arguably undermine the claim by various scholars regarding their
feminist orientation.

Displacing Feminism in “Uncle Abraham’s Romance”

and “From the Dead”
According to Rutledge, one of the strategies Nesbit uses to mitigate the
feminist possibilities raised in her children’s fiction is adopting “the
fantastic mode” to imply that resolutions privileging the New Woman
are fundamentally the stuff of fantasy and thus have no place in reality
(225). Nesbit, in this regard, is unique among her fellow women writ-
ers, many of whom have been known to engage the fantastic in their
writings because it affords them “special kinds of freedom … to offer
critiques of male power and sexuality which are often more radical
than those in more realist genres” (Wallace 57). Although Rutledge
does not discuss Nesbit’s Gothic tales in her essay, her observation
140 Andrew Hock Soon Ng
is nevertheless applicable to some of them as well, especially “Uncle
­Abraham’s Romance” (1893).11
Narrated as a first-person flashback by an elderly Abraham, who has
suffered from lameness since childhood, the tale recounts his brief court-
ship during his youth with a mysterious woman named Susannah from
their introduction at a cemetery, where they would thereafter always
rendezvous, to its termination when he discovers her true identity as a
ghost. Although we never learn about the circumstances surrounding Su-
sannah’s tragic fate, since this information is precluded from ­Abraham’s
knowledge, it is possible to surmise from the conversation he has with a
relative regarding a portrait of Susannah that her death, which occurred
“years ago [just] before her wedding,” was most probably punishment
for being “a witch” (31).12 This revelation results in Abraham’s failure to
keep his upcoming appointment at the cemetery with Susannah, thereby
terminating their relationship.
For Miller, by aligning “the trope of disability” and the fantastic with
the male and female protagonists respectively, “Uncle Abraham’s Ro-
mance” succeeds in affording its “characters greater opportunities for
romantic equality” (148).13 In fact, Miller suggests that the fantastic is
somewhat synonymous with disability when she compares Susannah’s
status as a ghost to an “experience of social disablement” (148). This
assessment indirectly signals a feminist premise in its promotion of a
non-hierarchical gender relationship, whereby

the unorthodox romance between two unlikely suitors … proves to

be a model for commitment, love, and desire between two individu-
als whose social experiences of marginalization and disability allow
them to become more equal in their partnership, albeit for a limited
time.
(Miller 152)

Persuasive as Miller’s claim may be, however, it is weakened by the dubi-

ousness of such a relationship in the first place. Here, rather than helping
to advance the story’s feminist persuasions, Nesbit’s appropriation of the
fantastic mode seems to restrict them by implying that such equality is
either unnatural or implausible.
Moreover, while the tale’s depiction of Susannah’s reliance on
­Abraham making his appointment for her very existence may reveal a
tacit feminist concern, this reading is undermined by the narrative sym-
pathy consistently directed at the human, not the ghost. This is effected
through the story’s emphasis on Abraham’s loneliness, belittlement by
girls, and social marginalization due to his disability, while largely with-
holding any insight into Susannah’s state of mind and emotions, save
for her noticeable sadness during the lovers’ final meeting when she tells
him, “if the new moon shines on this grave and you are not here—you
 The Fantastic and the Woman Question 141
will never see me again” (30). In doing so, the story not only effectively
circumscribes what could have been a serious confrontation with the
issue of female oppression, but also arguably exonerates the hero from
his role in invalidating the heroine’s presence because, having found out
Susannah’s true identity, his reason for not meeting her thereafter would
certainly be understandable. The question of whether Susannah’s disap-
pearance denotes utter dissolution, even as an apparition, or merely her
permanent departure from Abraham (since this is unclear in the nar-
rative) is, in my view, less important than the fact that she disappears
thereafter from the story. In the end, she seems only significant as a
bittersweet footnote in Abraham’s history. And since the account is re-
capitulated from Abraham’s point-of-view to his nephew, it is perhaps
unsurprising that narrative sympathy would largely remain with him
and not Susannah, as is evident in the story’s closing line: “He lighted
the pipe, and puffed silently for a moment or two before he said ‘But I
knew what youth means, and love, and happiness, though I was always
lame, and the girls used to laugh at me’” (31). Tellingly, Abraham’s state-
ment not only redirects attention back to himself but also reemphasizes
his physical condition, thereby arresting his nephew’s (and by extension,
our) inquiry regarding Susannah’s discontinued existence that was mo-
mentarily developing up to this point.
When “Uncle Abraham’s Romance” is read against Williams’s genre
theory, the warranty to its alleged feminist claim becomes even less per-
suasive. The story contains several elements that clearly mark it as male
Gothic: Susannah’s limited appearance in what is already a short text
(she occupies merely a page of four in the narrative); her departure from
the narrative after the couple’s final meeting; her reliance on Abraham
for textual presence; and her rejection by the hero as a result of her as-
sociation with the supernatural—all of which would likely suggest that
the story is not engaging the woman question with any degree of seri-
ousness. In the end, it is difficult to see how Abraham and S­ usannah
could represent a partnership that is egalitarian when the narrative
patently attempts to endear the reader to Abraham and privileges his
point of view, but represents Susannah as a shadowy and largely two-
dimensional figure whose only role in the story is to feature in the hero’s
bittersweet nostalgia.
Similar to “Uncle Abraham’s Romance,” “From the Dead” (1893) also
exhibits narrative features that strongly correspond with male Gothic;
if feminist concerns are circumscribed in the former, they are expressly
undermined in the latter. Central to “From the Dead” is Ida’s confession
to her husband, Arthur, that she forged a letter to induce his breakup
with a previous fiancée, Elvira. Infuriated, Arthur denounces his wife
and storms out of the house, but not before announcing their immediate
separation, which he would later confess belies more a hurt vanity than
disappointment with her. Having calmed down soon after, a contrite
142 Andrew Hock Soon Ng
Arthur returns home only to discover that she has departed, thus pre-
cipitating a quest to locate her that will last months and end in tragedy
when he learns that Ida has died in childbirth from an elderly woman in
whose home she had sought refuge. On the night of Ida’s wake, A ­ rthur
is suddenly interrupted by a sound emanating from the ­adjoining cham-
ber where her corpse is displayed. Although decidedly afraid, Arthur is
also hopeful of his wife’s return, “dead or alive,” so that he can beg her
forgiveness (43). When she finally materializes, however, he becomes so
overwhelmed with terror that rather than solicit her pardon, he com-
mences instead to “shriek aloud, again and again, and [cover] my face
with the sheet and [wind] it around my head and body, and [hold] it
with all my force” (44). As she retreats, it slowly dawns on him, albeit
too late, that he has failed his wife again. Now reduced to a “huddled
heap” at the threshold of the “death chamber,” Ida’s “corpse—in its
grave clothes” would signify her “second” death, which like Susannah’s
in the earlier story is final and permanent (44). As if to reinforce this
point, following the above-mentioned description is the word “dead”
repeated thrice, thereby figuratively bringing to mind the tolling of a
funeral bell and its implication of irrevocable loss.
A supernatural tale illustrating, variously, men’s failure toward the
opposite gender, women’s marginalization by the symbolic order as figu-
ratively represented by Ida’s attempt to return to the world of the living,
and the questionable promises of romantic love and union, “From the
Dead” is arguably conspicuous in its feminist inclination. At the same
time, however, typical of a Gothic text, it could also be read as a chal-
lenge to such inclinations. Ida’s character is central to these contradic-
tory interpretations: a modern woman who is proactive in getting what
she wants and who rejects the role of the deferential female, she is the
antithesis of Elvira, whose designation as a beautiful flatterer, which
suggests a lack of substance befitting an ornamental female, is more re-
flective of traditional femininity (35). But if Ida arguably represents the
New Woman, she could equally evoke its parody—a woman who, in the
name of opportunism, modernity, and progress in social relations, has
no qualms about using deception and hurting others to achieve her ends.
Indeed, it is obvious from the narrative that Ida’s act of forging a letter is
merely a catalyst for a series of duplicitous acts she will perpetrate. By al-
leging that Elvira had written a letter declaring her undying love for Ida’s
brother, Oscar, Ida effectively besmirches both Elvira and Oscar’s repu-
tations. And while their subsequent marriage “[b]efore six months was
gone,” in this regard, could suggest a happily-ever-after for them despite
(or as a result of) Ida’s manipulation, it could equally denote an attempt
to salvage their social statuses, even if it means entering a loveless part-
nership (35). In an attempt to console Arthur, Ida tells him “don’t think
I am not sorry for you” while declaring “I have done nothing but show
you the truth” and imploring him to “believe [her], [Elvira] never loved
 The Fantastic and the Woman Question 143
you” (33, 34). Here, Ida manipulates Arthur’s emotions to encourage
him to relinquish Elvira so that she can pursue him unrivalled. Addition-
ally, by insinuating that she had actually known all along about Elvira’s
lack of feelings for him, Ida merely plays the role of a concerned friend,
knowing all along that she is really betraying the friendship of the other
three parties involved.
It is, of course, possible to assume that Ida’s eventual confession to
Arthur regarding her ruse is indicative of guilt and remorse, thereby re-
deeming her so that she can then assume her part as the wronged h ­ eroine
and reclaim the story’s feminist import. This assumption, however, is
compromised when we turn to several narrative clues that arguably
point to a contrary interpretation that establishes Ida’s character as a
parody of the New Woman. The first, and most palpable, is the fact that
Ida only confesses after she and Arthur are comfortably married, which
provides her with a measure of legal and personal security. The second
involves her attempt to manage Arthur’s feelings via eliciting from him
a declaration that he loves her “[m]ore than [his] life” before divulging
her ruse; a strategy akin to emotional blackmail (35). While these clues
do not necessarily signify an absence of contrition on Ida’s part, they do
suggest calculation and manipulation which, in turn, would certainly
raise misgivings about her motivation for confessing. Taken together,
both clues conspicuously underscore Ida’s character with the view prev-
alent among Victorian anti-feminists (and even some feminists) linking
the New Woman with questionable morality—Eastwood describes her
as one who “like a riderless horse on the battlefield … charges about
with reckless abandon, unmindful of whom it might trample underfoot”
as long as she achieves her purpose (qtd. in Richardson and Willis 10).14
A clue that strongly indicates Ida’s lack of remorse is her refusal to
apologize to Arthur after revealing her treachery, instead daring him to
carry out his threat of separation by twice questioning his earnestness
before departing with the rejoinder, “[m]ake the best of what is left with
your life. I will spoil it no more” (36). Her effort to thereafter elude her
husband, in this regard, is less likely due to shame and guilt, and more
an attempt to punish her husband. Possibly reinforcing this line of argu-
ment is the account Ida gives to her landlady-cum-messenger concerning
her unhappy circumstances. Based on the woman’s later accusation of
Arthur that he “killed my pretty,” the text strongly suggests that Ida
has either kept silent or played down her role in the separation so as
to place blame squarely on her husband while she presents herself as a
hapless, mistreated victim (40). But perhaps the most damning clue of
all hinting at the narrative’s critique of Ida’s character is the final image
of her child who, “at four years old now … has never spoken and never
smiled” (44). Poignantly ironic, on the one hand, considering how this
tragic tale is the result of its mother’s deceptive and manipulative words,
the image also potentially symbolizes the lingering harmful effects of the
144 Andrew Hock Soon Ng
New Woman’s break with traditional social arrangements on not only
gender relations, but the family as well. Taking all the clues together,
Ida’s character reads more like the pernicious woman who is invariably
punished with death that is a hallmark of the male Gothic tradition.
Likewise, that the supernatural is unwelcomed by the hero because of its
affiliation with the heroine further subscribes the tale to male Gothic,
which then renders its feminist claim suspect.

Disavowing Feminism in “Man-Size in Marble”

Nesbit’s story that is most often read as a kind of feminist exposé
by scholars is the frequently anthologized “Man-Size in Marble”
(1893), which features a pair of young newlyweds, Jack and Laura,
an artist and professional writer respectively, who decide to move to
the country for financial reasons. Renting a cottage there, the couple
enjoy “married happiness” until the unexpected resignation of their
housekeeper, Mrs. Dorman, upsets their domestic arrangement (18).
To pacify Laura, who “hated housekeeping,” Jack tries to dissuade
Mrs. Dorman and presses her for an explanation (18). Reluctant at
first, she soon reveals that on the evening of the fast approaching All
Saints’ Day, “two bodies drawed out man-size in marble … effigies of
… knights in armor” that otherwise decorate a nearby church will visit
the cottage as they do every year. The cottage, Mrs. Dorman explains,
once housed an evil so profound that “the vengeance of Heavens” lit-
erally had to quell it, but apparently not completely because the evil
now possesses the statues, and hence their yearly visitation to the cot-
tage (21, 20). Mrs. Dorman warns that unless “the blessed cross-sign
[is inscribed] over the [cottage’s] doorstep and the windows” on that
day, the consequences will be disastrous (22). Typifying the modern,
rational man, Jack predictably dismisses the woman’s account as su-
perstitious nonsense and decides to withhold it from his wife. On that
fateful day, however, Laura appears noticeably pensive, which she tells
Jack is due to a “[presentiment] of evil” (13). Jack nevertheless goes
on to leave her at home by herself, after which point the narrative
becomes ambiguous, with Jack struggling to piece together the sub-
sequent events beginning with his discovery during his leisurely jaunt
that the statues are missing from the church. Jack immediately recalls
Mrs. Dorman’s story, and, in a panic, rushes off for home only to be
apprehended by his neighbor Kelly, a physician who manages to con-
vince Jack that he was merely hallucinating, which appears to be the
case since the statues are in their usual place—except for one missing
a hand—when the two men return to the church to investigate. How-
ever, Jack’s relief is short-lived when he arrives home to find Laura’s
lifeless body sprawled in the parlor with her hand “tightly clenched
[around] a grey marble finger” (28).
 The Fantastic and the Woman Question 145
Briggs’s equation of the finger with the “inhuman coldness and hard-
ness” of male (sexual) brutality suggests that Jack is complicit in his
wife’s death, thus indirectly reinforcing Terry Thompson’s argument
that Laura, like Elizabeth Frankenstein, is the intelligent and indepen-
dent woman who is ultimately sacrificed to reinforce the male symbolic
order represented by her otherwise ineffectual husband (Briggs 174;
Thompson 97–98). More candid in its condemnation of Jack is Free-
man’s essay, which labels the hero “a floppy-collared aesthete,” who, for
all his apparent Bohemianism and support for gender equality, “remains
a narrow-minded specimen of his class” (458). Laura, on the other hand,
is “artistic and sensitive” and “the story’s most positive and appealing
character … [which] makes her betrayal by patriarchy [and] the institu-
tion of marriage all the more horrific” (Freeman 464). Many scholars
read Laura’s economic self-reliance and rejection of the traditional wife’s
role as reflective of the New Woman. There is no disputing Jack’s chau-
vinism, which is evident in his first-person narrative that “speak[s] for
Laura … throughout the story,” his use of diminutive, reductive terms
like “pussy” and “little girl” to describe her, and his subscription to the
Victorian myth regarding women’s delicate constitutions (19, 22, 24).
The latter reason, in his mind, is why “she was always nervous, as highly
strung natures are” and must therefore be treated with gentleness, hence
his decision to abstain from communicating Mrs. Dorman’s story to
Laura (21).15
However, as with the case of Ida in “From the Dead,” the feminist
allegation that Laura is a blameless victim and Jack the symbol of male
indifference and aggression seems to ignore crucial narrative clues that
potentially suggest otherwise. The first is Laura’s reaction when con-
fronted with Mrs. Dorman’s resignation. For all her character’s iden-
tification with the modern professional woman, her reduction to a
“crumpled heap of pale muslin” when faced with the prospect of house-
keeping immediately undermines it (18). The purported New Woman
front Laura displays is reduced to its parody with her helpless crying and
bemoaning; she elaborates:

I shall have to cook the dinners and wash-up all the hateful, greasy
plates, and you’ll have to carry cans of water about, and clean the
boots and knives … [w]e shall have to work all day, and only be able
to rest when we are waiting for the kettle to boil.
(19)

While the implication that Jack will contribute to the impending chores
tacitly signals her rejection of the traditional gendered separation of la-
bor, Laura’s depiction possibly satirizes the professional woman who
lives “a full and independent life as man’s equal” (Ledger 12). According
to Ledger, it was this representation of the New Woman that was “most
146 Andrew Hock Soon Ng
vilified … during the last two decades of the nineteenth century” due
likely in part to her defeminization via her participation in the mascu-
line sphere and hence, her refusal or inability to perform domestic du-
ties (12). It is indeed telling that Laura’s function as parody potentially
reveals Nesbit’s own conflicted position regarding the woman question.
After all, like Nesbit, she too is a professional writer and breadwinner.
Second, if Laura’s apparent identification with the New Woman is un-
dercut by the episode of Mrs. Dorman’s resignation, it becomes a threat
against gender norms and the domestic setting of the Victorian era when
Laura usurps Jack’s status as the dominant figure in the household. Not
only is Laura the principal breadwinner, thus already contravening the
late nineteenth-century mandate against women earning money, she also
appears to be the only one working based on the fact that the narrative
provides no indication of Jack’s employment, but much of his sightsee-
ing, neighborly visits, and sketching for leisure. When contrasted with
Laura, whom we are told “would sit at the table and write verses for the
Monthly Marplot” in order to earn “guineas” from what Jack terms her
“little magazine stories,” it becomes clear who occupies a more promi-
nent financial position in the household (18).
Jack and Laura’s role reversal is not only hinted at by her tacit refusal
to play the traditional wife but, oddly enough, his impressive domestic
aptitude. Notable in Laura’s complaint about housework quoted earlier
is the transition from “I” to “we” that demonstrates her rejection of gen-
der hierarchy and its designation of specific domestic roles; in shifting
to a collective pronoun, Laura is implying that housework is a shared
responsibility. Compared to Laura, Jack is undoubtedly better at deal-
ing with servants and, unlike her, does not mind domestic chores, as
evinced by his competence at washing dishes, lighting the kitchen fire,
and preparing breakfast, albeit with some help from Laura (22, 23). But
perhaps the strongest indication of Jack’s “effeminate performance” is
the episode in which he encounters Kelly after realizing that the statues
are missing (Freeman 481). Here, the term used for Jack’s panic is “hys-
teria,” equating male anxiety to a medical condition linked intrinsically
and nearly-exclusively with women in the period (26).16 Taking into ac-
count that “Man-size in Marble” was written at the time when psycho-
analysis was gaining traction in Europe and the juxtaposition between
Jack and Kelly, who is described as “six feet of solid common sense,” it
is possible that “hysteria” may have been deliberately chosen by Nesbit
precisely to denote Jack’s compromised masculinity.
Interpreting literature based on an author’s biography is admittedly
always suspect, but when carefully substantiated, it can sometimes prove
illuminating. This is certainly the case with “Man-Size in Marble,” es-
pecially in relation to Laura’s eventual destruction. While Laura’s appar-
ent success as a writer conspicuously mirrors Nesbit’s own professional
circumstances, it also serves as an opportunity for Nesbit to distinguish
 The Fantastic and the Woman Question 147
herself from the New Woman. As mentioned earlier in my discussion
and consistently noted by Nesbit scholars, despite her accomplishments
and role as her family’s financial mainstay, she remained deferential to
her husband in her views on the woman question. Nesbit’s disapproval
of Laura is conveyed by her punishment, tacitly demonstrating Nesbit’s
own rejection of gender equality and its ensuing dangers. Read in this bi-
ographical light, we can see how the story conceivably incriminates Laura,
to an extent, in her own violent end. By usurping her husband’s position
in the household and figuratively feminizing him, however unintended
these consequences may be, Laura—the New Woman—is not only sub-
verting the gender hierarchy but also confusing gender roles, and is hence
a formidable threat to the patriarchal and heteronormative ideology in-
forming Victorian culture and society. Although Laura is undoubtedly a
victim, she is not blameless. And while her fault is admittedly less direct
than Ida’s, it is arguably more potent since another male character must
be introduced into the story as compensatory masculinity (symbolized
by Kelly’s profession and superior rational mind) to restore the symbolic
order. Indeed, the marble finger clutched in Laura’s hand can be read
as the final phallic object among others intimated throughout the story,
including the penetrating gaze (a male prerogative) and the pen (Laura’s
writing), that together represent a signifying chain linking ­Laura’s death
back to her egregious crime of transgressing the gender divide.

The (Anti) Feminist Orientation of Nesbit’s Gothic

Like “Uncle Abraham’s Romance” and “From the Dead,” “Man-Size in
Marble” displays narrative features suggesting its classification as male
Gothic, which would then circumscribe its feminist agenda or render
it moot altogether. Its representation of a strong and assertive heroine
who is rewarded with a tragic death, as opposed to the hero whose com-
promised masculinity is compensated with a hypermasculine character,
clearly reflects a gender bias typifying male Gothic whereby hierarchi-
cal heteronormativity is not only maintained but validated as more or
less the only acceptable kind of social relationship. By upsetting gender
norms, Laura inevitably becomes a menace to the symbolic order and in-
directly complicit in her own doom. While she is not an embodiment of
a supernatural threat but rather its victim, unlike the women in the first
two stories, she is nevertheless the only character in the story that has
any contact with the phenomenon. Jack’s absence during Laura’s fatal
attack, when framed against Williams’s theory regarding the supernatu-
ral as threat that must be excised from the hero’s field of vision, supports
the story’s designation as male Gothic.
In all three stories discussed in this chapter, there is strong textual
evidence that, for Nesbit, the fantastic does not serve the ideological
purpose of subtly advancing the woman question, but rather is adopted
148 Andrew Hock Soon Ng
as a narrative mode to displace or subvert feminist concerns by redi-
recting blame away from men and relocating it onto the inexplicable.
More inclined toward male Gothic, these stories are therefore no dif-
ferent from Nesbit’s other literary writings in terms of their treatment
of feminist concerns. As with her children’s fiction and adult romance
novels, Nesbit’s Gothic tales often introduce a feminist issue only to
then “carefully [circumscribe]” it so that they are not tasked to “directly
confront or challenge conventions” (Rutledge 229). While their heroines
may exhibit attitudes befitting the New Woman, such as rejecting the
gendered roles prescribed by tradition and insisting on gender equality
in a marriage, the women are also duplicitous and/or somehow complicit
in their own inimical end. Coupled with the fact that these three sto-
ries representing Nesbit’s Gothic conclude with the female protagonist’s
death and the restoration of the patriarchal and heteronormative status
quo, it necessarily begs the question if they could implicate an agenda
that is not reductive of women, much less a feminist one.

Notes
1 Known today primarily for her children’s fiction such as The Railway Chil-
dren (1906) and Five Children and It (1902), Nesbit also produced four
volumes of Gothic stories during her career: Something Wrong (1893), Grim
Tales (1893), Tales Told in the Twilight (1899), and Fear (1910). Nesbit also
wrote the occasional Gothic tale for publications such as The Saturday Eve-
ning Post, The Windsor Magazine, and The Strand. Many of these stories
have recently been republished in The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror
(2006). However, apart from “Man-Size in Marble” (1893), the majority of
her supernatural stories were considered undistinguished by her critics and
biographers, and thus received negligible attention for much of the twenti-
eth century. Doris Langley Moore, for instance, acknowledges that Nesbit’s
Gothic tales are “more genuinely horrid than any tale by Mrs. Radcliffe
and Mary Shelley,” but ultimately pronounces them “singularly ineffectual
and deservedly forgotten” (Moore 23). According to Hadji, the reason for
their neglect hitherto may be due to their uneven quality, sensationalism,
and occasional vulgarity, and if his assessment reads slightly less damning,
it is only because he attests as well to “the appealing simplicity of her prose
style” and the unique perspective of the alienated woman they offer (300).
2 Other critical essays that betray a strong feminist orientation include those
by Kathleen A. Miller, Nick Freeman, and Terry W. Thompson.
3 Bland’s reductive view of women is clearly expressed in his essay, “If I were
a Woman” (1898), where he writes:
Woman’s realm is the realm of the heart and the afternoon tea-table,
not the brain and the intelligence. It is hers to bewitch the man, not
convince him …. Most of [the women] that I know do nothing at all for
their livings; they are content to merely exist beautifully, thus realizing,
apparently without the slightest effort, my own highest aspiration, my
own loftiest ideal.
(209, 205)
 The Fantastic and the Woman Question 149
4 Indeed, the issue of her writing’s marketability is an important one consid-
ering the fact that the majority of her Gothic stories “were composed in the
late 1880s and … primarily for money” due to her family’s dire finances re-
sulting from Bland’s entrepreneurial failures. One historian describes Bland
as being “ill-equipped for business,” and as such, he suffered a succession of
failed ventures that made him mostly incapable of providing for his house-
hold (Smith 35). At the same time, however, these stories possibly also reveal
the “strong undercurrents of anxiety and emotional pain she must have felt
at that time” (Davies 9).
5 With regards to Bland’s position, take, for example, the following excerpt
from his essay, “To the Emperor of Japan”:

You may have heard, for instance, that though we allow a woman to sit
upon our Throne we do not permit one of her sex to be called into her
counsels. Our women are expected, and indeed compelled, to obey the
laws, but they are not suffered to assist in making them. We invite them,
with an unrefusable invitation, to pay the taxes; but we do not suffer them
to have a say in the levying of them…. We consider the business of law-
making and tax-levying a dirtyish business, fit only for the coarser nature
of men.
(66–67)
Notwithstanding his use of rhetoric to (falsely) denote gallantry, Bland’s lan-
guage palpably shows his disapproval of women’s participation in govern-
ment, of which the levying of taxes is merely an issue that, in turn, implicitly
reflects his dismissal of the suffrage movement.
6 Of the handful of critical essays on Nesbit’s Gothic fiction, only Lowell T.
Frye’s “The Ghost Story and the Subjection of Women: The Example of
Amelia Edwards, M.E. Braddon, and E. Nesbit” demonstrates a more bal-
anced treatment of its male and female protagonists.
7 The former includes Nesbit’s series on the adventures of the Bastable family
and “Five Children,” while the latter encompasses titles like Daphne of Fitz-
roy Street (1909), Salome and the Head (1909), and The Incredible Honey-
moon (1916), among others.
8 The alleged complicity of her heroines somewhat reinforces Michelle Massé’s
proposition that “narrative sympathy” in Gothic literature fundamentally
“remains with the perpetrator of trauma, not its victim” (23).
9 Hurley’s focus is more on the notion of the abhuman, which she argues is
often represented in the Gothic as feminine or feminized.
10 Examples of these supernatural women include the Bloofer Lady in Stoker’s
Dracula (1897) and Ayesha in H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887).
11 All references to Edith Nesbit’s Gothic stories are from The Power of Dark-
ness: Tales of Terror (2006).
12 Nesbit will repeat the trope of the punished witch in “The Ebony Frame”
(1893).
13 However, Miller equally contends that despite the couple’s efforts to “test
the boundaries of fin-de-siècle theories of degeneration, gender, and disabil-
ity, they do not ultimately transcend them” (152).
14 See also Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de
Siécle.
15 As Nina Auerbach observes, “physical weaknesses [were] wished on women
to convince [Victorian] patriarchy of their inferiority” and hence justify its
reductive treatment of them (8). See also Hurley (120).
150 Andrew Hock Soon Ng
16 For more information on hysteria’s link to women, see Lizzie Harris
­McCormick, “Daydream Believers: Female Imagination in Women’s Fin-de-
Siècle Fantastic Fiction” in The Fantastic of the Fin-de-Siècle.

Works Cited
Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth.
Harvard UP, 1982.
Bland, Hubert. Essays, edited by Edith Nesbit-Bland. Max Goschen, 1914.
Briggs, Julia. A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858–1924. New
Amsterdam Books, 1987.
Davies, David Stuart. “Introduction.” The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror.
Wordsworth, 2006, pp. 7–13.
Freeman, Nick. “E. Nesbit’s New Woman Gothic.” Women’s Writing, vol. 14,
no. 3, 2008, pp. 454–469.
Frye, Lowell T. “The Ghost Story and the Subjection of Women: The Example
of Amelia Edwards, M.E. Braddon, and E. Nesbit.” Victorian Institute Jour-
nal, vol. 26, 1998, pp. 167–209.
Hadji, Robert. “Nesbit, E. (1858–1924).” The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror
and the Supernatural, edited by Jack Sullivan, Penguin, 1986, pp. 299–300.
Haggard, H. Rider. She. Longman, Green and Co., 1887.
Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters.
Duke UP, 1998.
Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality. Materiality and Degeneration at the
Fin de Siécle. Cambridge UP, 1996.
Karschay, Stephan. Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de
Siécle. Palgrave, 2015.
Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle.
Manchester UP, 1997.
Liggins, Emma. “Gendering the Spectral Encounter at the Fin de Siècle.” Gothic
Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2013, pp. 37–52.
Margree, Victoria. “The Feminist Orientation in Edith Nesbit’s Gothic Short
Fiction.” Women’s Writing, vol. 21, no. 4, 2014, pp. 425–443.
Massé, Michelle. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic.
Cornell UP, 1992.
McCormick, Lizzie Harris. “Daydream Believers: Female Imagination in
­Women’s Fin-de-Siècle Fantastic Fiction.” The Fantastic of the Fin de Siè-
cle, edited by Irena Grubica and Zdenek Beran. Cambridge Scholars, 2016,
pp. 159–176.
Miller, Kathleen A. “The Mysteries of the In-Between: Re-reading Disability in
E. Nesbit’s Late Victorian Gothic Fiction.” Journal of Literary and Cultural
Disability Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2012, pp. 143–157.
Moore, Doris Langley. E Nesbit: A Biography. Chilton, 1966.
Nesbit, Edith. Grim Tales. A. D. Innes and Company, 1893.
———. Something Wrong. A.D. Innes and Company, 1893.
———. Tales Told in the Twilight. Ernest Nister, 1899.
———. Fear. St. Paul and Company, 1910.
———. “From the Dead.” The Power of Darkness; Tales of Terror, edited by
David Stuart Davies. Wordsworth, 2006, pp. 31–42.
 The Fantastic and the Woman Question 151
———. “Man-Size in Marble.” The Power of Darkness; Tales of Terror, edited
by David Stuart Davies. Wordsworth, 2006, pp. 15–26.
———. The Power of Darkness; Tales of Terror, edited by David Stuart Davies.
Wordsworth, 2006.
———. “Uncle Abraham’s Romance.” The Power of Darkness; Tales of Terror,
edited by David Stuart Davies. Wordsworth, 2006, pp. 27–30.
Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Penguin Classics, October 1, 2001.
Richardson, Angelique and Chris Willis. “Introduction.” The New Woman in
Fiction and Fact: Fin de Siècle Feminism, edited by Angelique Richardson
and Chris Willis. Palgrave, 2002, pp. 1–38.
Rutledge, Amelia A. “E. Nesbit and the Woman Question.” Victorian Women
Writers and the Woman Question, edited by Nicola Diane Thompson, Cam-
bridge UP, 1999.
Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. Routledge, 2000.
Smith, Adrian. The New Statesman: Portrait of a Political Weekly, 1913–1931.
Frank Cass, 1996.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Archibald Constable and Company, 1897.
Thompson, Terry W. “‘Presentiments of Evil’: Sourcing Frankenstein in Edith
Nesbit’s’ ‘Man-Size in Marble.’” CEA Critic, vol. 73, no. 2, 2011, pp. 91–100.
Wallace, Diana. “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic.” Gothic
Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 57–68.
Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. U of Chicago P, 1995.
10 Fantastic Transformations
Queer Desires and “Uncanny
Time” in Work by Radclyffe
Hall and Virginia Woolf
Jennifer Mitchell

The literary lives—if not the actual lives—of Radclyffe Hall and Virginia
Woolf were remarkably intertwined. Throughout the 1920s, both writ-
ers were preoccupied with so-called “women’s” issues; while those issues
ranged from economic independence to freedom of expression, Woolf
and Hall were simultaneously interested in the literary representation
of same-sex female desire.1 Certainly both women’s experiences with
queerness had distinct manifestations, and, as such, their works rep-
resenting that desire differ substantially, with particular regard to the
dynamic between sex and gender. As Ellen Bayuk Rosenman explains,
in the early twentieth century, given the implications of circulating
sexological theories, “lesbian sexual practice was conflated with male
gender identity” (640). Although Hall’s “dramatically masculine appear-
ance”—along with that of her 1920s heroines, Miss Ogilvy and Stephen
Gordon—could be considered evidence of this theoretical overlap,
Woolf’s queer experiences with Violet Dickinson and Vita Sackville-West
seemed to counter the sexological narratives of the time (Rosenman 641).
Woolf’s own approach to same-sex desire, however, demanded a dis-
avowal of what she perceived as the “mannish lesbian,” which “acceded
to a gender hierarchy that Woolf explicitly rejected—the devaluation of
the feminine that left the woman writer with the false and damaging
choice between being ‘only a woman’ or ‘as good as a man’” (Rosenman
641–42). For Hall, though, queer desire could be best understood as
what Havelock Ellis termed “sexual inversion,” which “leads a person
to feel like a person of the opposite sex, and to adopt, so far as possible,
the tastes, habits, and dress of the opposite sex, while the direction of the
sexual impulse remains normal” (2). Her ensuing masculine wardrobe
was, then, a testament to this queer cross-gendering.
As a result of their distinct approaches to and understandings of gen-
der and sexuality, their respective literary works that tackle the sub-
ject are notably different. Woolf’s Orlando (1928) is most often put in
conversation with Hall’s most prominent novel, The Well of Loneliness
(1928), as both texts “struggle to represent a relatively new cultural
phenomenon—homosexuality in women” (Cohler 153).2 This type of
comparative reading, though, consistently fixates on the cultivation of
 Fantastic Transformations 153
a queer kinship between Stephen Gordon and Orlando, reading both
texts as realist. Given the prominence of both texts, such a comparison
is fruitful, albeit predictable. Fewer critics read Orlando in conjunction
with “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” (1926, 1934), perhaps uninterested
in the complexities of cross-genre engagement or unsettled by the loose
ambiguity in “Miss Ogilvy,” which seems to have been tightened up in
The Well.3
And yet, one potentially surprising element that underscores both
women’s literary experimentations with queer sexualities and subjectivi-
ties in “Miss Ogilvy” and Orlando is their reliance on the fantastic as a
significant narrative tool. As such, this chapter investigates the way that
Hall and Woolf both employed the fantastic as a means of codifying
queer desire in seemingly anachronistic or impossibly transhistoric ways.
Both texts connect overtly fantastic elements to the capacity for poten-
tial queerness in their respective protagonists and the ensuing possibility
of a queer sexual fulfillment. The awkwardly queer titular Miss Ogilvy
views men as comrades not husbands, spends time in a women’s ambu-
lance unit during WWI, and, like many of Hall’s other protagonists, has
shockingly short hair. Miss Ogilvy’s postwar journey to find herself,
so to speak, takes her away from her home to a cave in which she falls
into a dreamlike hallucinatory state, transforms into a man, and enacts
a simplistic, primitive sexual affair with a young woman. The morning
after, Miss Ogilvy’s dead body is found outside of the cave. Orlando’s
early days as a young romantic nobleman jilted by the woman he loves
inform his subsequent inexplicable transformation into a woman, whose
lifespan extends far beyond that of an ordinary mortal being. Over the
centuries of Orlando’s life, a transformative queer bisexuality manifests
itself in a variety of love affairs, only to be ultimately amputated in favor
of a “traditional” heteronormative, procreative marriage. These dueling
uses of the fantastic reinforce its value in transcending both the limita-
tions of the realist literary form and the limitations of contemporary
expressions and designations of gender and sexuality. It is not simply
that both authors used the fantastic in order to subvert dominant ideolo-
gies regarding sex and gender; rather, the fantastic enabled both writers
to momentarily imagine—at least hypothetically—a world wherein the
tethers of heteronormativity could be severed without explanation or
justification.
Both texts primarily employ what Rosemary Jackson identifies as a
foundational element in the realm of the fantastic: “Metamorphosis,
with its stress upon instability of natural forms, obviously plays a large
part in fantastic literature” (81 emphasis added). This question of “nat-
ural forms” and their potential “instability” is at the heart of ­Orlando
and “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” wherein both titular characters
“swap” sexes at some point. Because both narratives involve a gendered
transformation—or a transformative gendering—such metamorphoses
154 Jennifer Mitchell
expose the fragility of sex distinctions. Miss Ogilvy and Orlando are,
in fact, both the same and different when they have changed sexes, a
“fact” that is only substantiated by the interjection of fantastic elements.
The necessity of the fantastic as the means of conversion is expressly
tied to Miss Ogilvy’s lifelong seemingly impossible wish: “My God! If
only I were a man! … if only I had been born a man!” (11). For Hall
critic Richard Dellamora the fantasy of this transformation—from
twentieth-century female invert to Neolithic caveman—is the only way
for Miss Ogilvy to find sexual satisfaction, simultaneously subverting
and sustaining the boundaries between the sexes. For Woolf’s Orlando
whose “sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only
one set of clothing can conceive,” fantastic transformation is the sole
mechanism that enables Orlando to reveal the instability of the perfor-
mative elements that connect gender and sex (221).
Notably, the element of the fantastic within Hall’s short story and
Woolf’s novel involves an express experimentation with traditional lin-
ear notions of time; accordingly, queerness, in both texts, intersects with
questions of chronological movement but is not bound by conventional
narrative limitations. Miss Ogilvy’s “return” to an earlier state of hu-
man history and Orlando’s triumph over the laws of mortality embody
the theoretical connection between queer subjectivities and chronolo-
gies. For Miss Ogilvy and Orlando, and by extension Hall and Woolf,
it is through fantastic transformation that queer desire and queer time
intersect, carving out the space for identities that, apparently, could not
possibly and pleasurably exist in England in the 1920s.
The notion of forward moving time is challenged by Hall and Woolf
in distinct—and distinctly queer—ways: for Miss Ogilvy, time refuses
to move linearly and homogeneously forward; for Orlando, the rules of
time fundamentally change as she stops being subject to its limitations.
In Time Binds (2010), Elizabeth Freeman attempts to “think against the
dominant arrangement of time and history,” explaining the relationship
between “multiple discursive regimes…that depend on empty homoge-
neous time”: “coming out, consummation, development, domesticity,
family, foreplay, genealogy, identity, liberation, modernity, the progress
of movements…all of which take their meanings from, and contribute
to, a vision of time as seamless, unified, and forward moving” (xi, xxii).
Freeman points to markers of time that reinforce its unquestioned lin-
earity. Hall’s and Woolf’s representations of time in both texts can be
read, then, as examples of what Freeman terms “queer temporalities”:
“points of resistance to this temporal order that, in turn, propose other
possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present, and
future others” (xxii). Such queer temporalities are themselves challenges
to the types of institutions that are tethered to an unyielding movement
forward: aging, marriage, reproduction. For example, Jack ­Halberstam
understands this relationship between queerness and temporality in
 Fantastic Transformations 155
oppositional terms: “Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in
part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and
reproduction” (1). The danger in this oppositional framework is, of
course, that it has the potential to reinforce its own linearity. Yet, by
acknowledging and subsequently challenging straightforward linearity,
queer time is itself an alternate way of organizing movement relative to
the past, present, and future; as Freeman explains, “queer time emerged
from within, alongside and beyond this heterosexually gendered
double-time of stasis and progress, intimacy and genealogy” (23 empha-
sis added).
Freeman’s definition of queer time, in many ways an extension and
retheorizing of Halberstam’s work, hones in on the uncanny potential
of time play. Given that Freud’s understanding of the “uncanny” was,
itself, about the apparently paradoxical merging of the familiar and the
unfamiliar—“that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other,
that which is concealed and kept out of sight”—queer time, which is it-
self both familiar as a type of temporality and unfamiliar as a non-linear
experiment, can be understood in the context of this chapter as what I’m
calling “uncanny time” (Freud 132). Miss Ogilvy’s “return” to primitiv-
ism and Orlando’s transcendence of the confines of mortal linearity, in
many ways, “ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes
to light” (Freud 132).
Tellingly, in “The Uncanny,” Freud famously uses E.T.A. Hoffmann’s
“The Sandman” as a quintessential example of what he is explaining.
The questions of legibility at the core of Freud’s analysis of Nathanael,
Hoffmann’s protagonist, are tied to the uncanny possibility of misread-
ing an automaton as human. By forsaking his “real” betrothed, who is
physically removed from the narrative—surfacing in epistolary form—
for Olympia, a life-like doll whose tangible body renders her momen-
tarily more present, Nathanael falls victim to his own untrustworthy
perceptions. His experiences in “The Sandman”—what underscores
Freud’s analysis of the text, in fact—are evidence of the body’s engage-
ment with and negotiation of a seemingly precarious, albeit historicized,
world. While that may seem like an obvious claim, it is through what
Freeman terms “erotohistoriography” that the body’s central posi-
tion relative to the shifting conceptions of chronological movement is
acknowledged:

Erotohistoriography does not write the lost object into the present
so much as encounter it already in the present, by treating the pres-
ent itself as hybrid. And it uses the body as a tool to effect, figure,
or perform that encounter. Erotohistoriography admits that contact
with historical materials can be precipitated by particular bodily
dispositions, and that these connections may elicit bodily responses,
even pleasurable ones, that are themselves a form of understanding.
156 Jennifer Mitchell
It sees the body as method, and historical consciousness as some-
thing intimately involved with corporeal sensations.
(Freeman 95–96 emphasis added)

Of course, in Hall’s short story and Woolf’s novel, this configuration of

erotohistoriography—the (queer) body as “method”—is made possible
by both women’s incorporation of the fantastic. As the means by which
their “original” bodies are replaced with alternative ones, the fantastic
enables both titular characters to experience the world in multiply erotic
ways. Both authors’ constructions of liminal characters within liminal
chronologies very literally theorize the intersection of “historical con-
sciousness” and “corporeal sensations.” Ultimately, both “Miss Ogilvy
Finds Herself” and Orlando situate queer desire, its enactment, and its
fulfillment outside of a traditional chronological lineage, employing the
fantastic as a means of imagining queer time and, consequently, queer
possibility.

Neolithic Queerness: The Transformation of Miss Ogilvy

Radclyffe Hall’s forenote to the first publication of “Miss Ogilvy
Finds Herself”—written in 1926 but published eight years later—
describes the story as “a brief excursion in to the realms of the fan-
tastic” (2). Clearly Hall envisioned this short story as a traditionally
fantastic one, though I would posit that she presents the fantastic as
the ­inexplicable: Miss Ogilvy’s “transformation,” from spinster invert
to tribal man, happens seemingly without cause and certainly without
explanation. Indeed, it is this lack of cause and explanation that helps
situate the tale within Hall’s conception of “the realms of the fantas-
tic.” For much of the story, Miss Ogilvy is reasonably ordinary given
the traditional markers of the designation “fantastic,” while remaining
overtly extraordinary given the expectations of her family. Described
as having a “tall, awkward body with its queer look of strength,”
Miss Ogilvy is the clear predecessor of The Well of Loneliness’s mas-
culine heroine, Stephen Gordon (3).4 The narrative renders her “queer”
body more broadly indicative of a queer subjectivity; her recollections
of childhood include “insisting with tears and some temper that her
real name was ­William and not Wilhelmina” (7). This explanation is
Hall’s translation of contemporaneously developing and circulating
sexological understandings of inversion. Hall relies on Havelock Ellis’s
association of female same-sex desire with male subjectivity in her for-
mulation of Miss Ogilvy’s specifically gendered experiences of kinship:
“Miss Ogilvy’s instinct made her like and trust men, for whom she had
a pronounced ­fellow-feeling” (7). 5
Comfortable with her life only while being useful in an ambulance unit
during World War I, Miss Ogilvy finds herself frustratingly discarded
 Fantastic Transformations 157
in its aftermath. Again, like Stephen who feels most productive during
the war effort, Miss Ogilvy returns to the home she left after having a
fleeting taste of the autonomy and agency afforded to men. Whereas
the war itself catalyzed the appearance and sanctioning of “many Miss
Ogilvies”—a testament to the war effort’s need for strong bodies, male
and queerly masculine alike—returning to Surrey makes Miss Ogilvy
long for the “appalling reality,” presumably the carnage that accompa-
nies wartime, that surrounded her work (12).6 As Sandra M. Gilbert
suggests,

For many women … whose inability to identify with conventional

‘femininity’ had always made their gender a problem to them, the
war facilitated not just a liberation from the constricting trivia of
parlors and petticoats but an unprecedented transcendence of the
profounder constraints imposed by traditional sex roles.
(441)7

As a result, Miss Ogilvy’s return to the restrictive femininity of her

­sisters, criticized by the narrator ascribing to them the “usual imagi-
nary” ailments, aggressively chips away at Miss Ogilvy’s particular
strength, tempering the “prowess” she harnessed on the front (13):

Had she ever been that courageous person who had faced death in
France with such perfect composure? Had she ever stood tranquilly
under fire, without turning a hair, while she issued her orders? Had
she ever been treated with marked respect?
(16)

In an attempt to ward off the destructive effects of this constant self-

doubt, Miss Ogilvy heads to “a small island that is still very little known
to the world … chosen … at random” (18). Her arrival on the island is
framed in terms of “distorted” and “coloured” memory, which “wor-
ried her sorely” having “never set foot on the island before that actual
morning” (21). This “remembering all wrong,” while it troubles Miss
Ogilvy, echoes the satisfaction that she experiences even amidst the
devastation in France; she thinks the impossible situation “extremely
odd,” but is somehow still “pleased…with its oddness” (21). Further,
the phrase “remembering all wrong,” is, again, a testament to the pos-
sibilities inherent in queer time as Freeman and Halberstam theorize
it. The familiarity of the island—an inchoate kinship that Miss Ogilvy
cannot quite understand or describe—yields a “very profound content-
ment which surged over her spirit” (21). And so Miss Ogilvy, once im-
plausibly at home on the front in France, now finds herself inexplicably
at home on this tiny isolated island that seems to exist outside of the
resilient forwardly charging movement of time.
158 Jennifer Mitchell
The fantastic element in the story asserts itself through Miss Ogilvy’s
phantasmagoria, wherein she is simultaneously both herself and a Neo-
lithic man:

Miss Ogilvy knew that she was herself, that is to say she was con-
scious of her being, and yet she was not Miss Ogilvy at all, nor had
she a memory of her. All that she now saw was very familiar, all
that she now did was what she should do, and all that she now was
seemed perfectly natural.
(24–25)

Once again, the narrative frames this fantastic transformation as nat-

ural, if also paradoxical. This liminal moment, in which she exists in
between dreaming and being awake, in between being herself and being
someone else, climaxes as she walks along the beach suddenly attrib-
uting a new body to herself, one that is “immensely tall,” “extremely
hairy,” and unquestionably masculine (25). The sudden male body that
theoretically should shock Miss Ogilvy seems perfectly natural precisely
because this “new” identity for Miss Ogilvy is not exactly new; rather,
it appears to have been conjured up from a series of transient memories
from the synthesis of her own gender-bending childhood and a generic
history—possibly a sort of queer collectivity—that she cannot specifi-
cally identify.
By becoming the male party in a heterosexual, tribal romance that
relies upon and highlights “traditional” gender roles, Miss Ogilvy
finds herself with an “adoring and sexually submissive” female part-
ner ­(Wachman 209). The declarative acknowledgement of her sexual-
ized partner, “You…woman,” explains the critical assertion that Miss
Ogilvy “can fully respond to another female only if she is able to identify
her as woman” (Hall 32; Dellamora 225). Miss Ogilvy’s queer desires
are sublimated into a sexologically inflected fantasy, wherein inversion
is rendered acceptably manifest only if and when Miss Ogilvy’s earlier
female body supernaturally becomes male. Indeed, Miss Ogilvy’s previ-
ously troublesome sexed body is successfully masculinized in its trans-
formation as the young female partner acknowledges Miss Ogilvy as
“My master; blood of my body” (28).
Transformed Miss Ogilvy—Neolithic, masculine, virile, heterosexual
man—and her naïve female partner express tellingly misogynistic sen-
timents. Miss Ogilvy’s “little companion” interjects this ego-boosting
flirtation: “There is no one so strong as you. You are surely the strongest
man in our tribe” (26). The control that Miss Ogilvy exerts and that
her lover requests suggests that this not-quite-so-heterosexual pairing
ultimately subscribes to heteronormative gender norms. As the inevi-
tability of their sexual coupling draws nearer, Miss Ogilvy’s partner
explains, “all of me is for you and none other. For you this body has
 Fantastic Transformations 159
ripened” (27). The framing of the girl’s virginity as solely the gift for
her male “master,” betrays the restrictive, regulatory heteronormativity
inherent in what might otherwise be considered queer. And yet, Miss
Ogilvy’s previous “aversion” to all things (hetero)sexual is replaced by a
persistent sexual drive as the young girl becomes aware of and reacts to
her partner’s physical desires (8):

“No…no…” she gasped. For, divining his need, she was weak with
the longing to be possessed, yet the terror of love lay heavy upon her.
“No…no…” she gasped.
But he caught her wrist and she felt the great strength of his rough,
gnarled fingers, the great strength of the urge that leapt in his loins,
and again she must give that quick gasp of fear, the while she clung
close to him lest he should spare her.
(34)8

This scene culminates in the sexual fulfillment of primitive heterosex-

ual desire, with “the lord of these creatures”—Miss Ogilvy’s newfound
identity—

thinking … of life as he murmured the word that had so many

meanings. That meant: ‘Little spring of exceedingly pure water.’
That meant: ‘Hut of peace for a man after battle.’ That meant: ‘Ripe
red berry sweet to the taste.’ That meant: ‘Happy small home of
future generations.’
(35)

This romantic muttering, recalling images of nature, war, the senses,

and the future—what Cohler deems Hall’s apparently impossible “pas-
toral ideal”—is Miss Ogilvy’s (as the tribal man she becomes) last living
gesture: one that extends beyond her own personal experience to the
experience of a people, a nation, a world (153).
After the unfolding of this fantasy, Miss Ogilvy can neither return
to her modern female body nor remain in the prehistoric past, hence
the discovery of her corpse in the last paragraph of the story; whereas
Miss Ogilvy’s liminal positions in her world—between male and female,
queer and straight, even war and peace—were once seemingly accept-
able, her experience of herself as sexualized male is momentary and
fleeting. Indeed, Richard Dellamora explains the seeming difficulty of
Miss Ogilvy’s complex subjectivity: “What Ogilvy may desire is an en-
try into manhood that would unlock her affectively and sexually and,
through finding sexual love, enable her to reclaim her own estranged fe-
male embodiment” (227). Of course, such “female embodiment,” which
prior to this trip to the island was a constant source of frustration for
her, proves ultimately untenable for Miss Ogilvy. Accordingly, the tale’s
160 Jennifer Mitchell
transformations, from female to male and from modern to primitive,
exist as challenges to both the restrictively narrow confines of gender
and the predictable linear movement of time. The fantastic here enables
Hall, through Miss Ogilvy, to present readers with multiple potentially
“trans” narratives—transgender, transsexual, transhistorical.9

“An Unexpected Turn”: Orlando’s Queer Timelessness

Like Miss Ogilvy, Orlando’s transformations are both cross-gender and
transhistorical, thereby connecting the capacity for queerness with a
penchant for bending, blurring, or defying the “laws” of time. Yet, un-
like Hall’s protagonist who accesses masculine agency by going back
in time, Woolf’s is ousted from both male power and privilege and the
limitations of past and present. By the end of the novel, in fact, the nar-
rator explains,

That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment
will, perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get
into her motor car with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian
mountains. And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful
practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way,
somehow contrive to synchronise the sixty or seventy different times
which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that
when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present
is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past.
(305)10

The conflation of chronological distinctions here, the multiple synchro-

nicities that Orlando experiences and embodies, is itself a type of queer
time; for the novel as a whole, this late description articulates Orlan-
do’s position outside of traditional linearity and its limits. Even before
­Orlando’s sex swap, after a coma-like trance, he changes from “an
­Elizabethan man of action to a Jacobean melancholic, much possessed
by death” (Briggs 197). Before the most overt of the narrative’s fantas-
tic elements is revealed, Orlando’s existence only flirts with the kind of
queer time that both Halberstam and Freeman articulate. Within the
confines of a forwardly moving progression, Orlando’s seamless embod-
iment of various period-specific norms emphasizes his innate capacity for
multiplicity—something that underscores the subsequent “ease” of his
transition. Shifting from one period to the next, Orlando moves through
his early life without much regard for his gender beyond his early “ar-
chetypical” love affair with Sasha, wherein Orlando learns “for the first
time…the delights of love” (Briggs 196; Woolf 45). After all, beyond
the performance of courtship—the abrupt transitions from being “hot…
with love” to “melancholy” to “dark forebodings” (44–45, 51)—he has
 Fantastic Transformations 161
little reason to critically consider the outward manifestation of his sex,
though the narrator makes that manifestation both clear and significant
in the novel’s first sentence: “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex,
though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it” (13). Beyond
this formative introduction, which Jamie Hovey reads as the “stabi-
liz[ing of] Orlando’s indeterminate gender,” the narrative explanation of
Orlando’s transformation makes no mention of such mundane markers
(398): “He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete na-
kedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth!
we have no choice left but confess—he was a woman” (Woolf 137). The
hypothetical spectacle of pealing trumpets, though, is undercut by the
simple pronouncement, “he was a woman.”
However, when Orlando transforms from male to female, her aware-
ness of sex and gender is rendered necessarily explicit as the narrative
itself begins to pay particular attention to such distinctions:

If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando

as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and
the same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand
free to seize his sword; the woman must use hers to keep the satins
from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in
the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking.
The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of
suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that
their outlook might have been the same too.
(188 emphasis added)

The narrator’s description of physical difference here is more broadly

indicative of emotional and mental differences as well. Those differ-
ences, significantly, are not presented to readers as natural, as the or-
ganic consequences of Orlando’s sex change, but are more accurately
framed in terms of social construction. The unquestionable masculin-
ity that shone through despite earlier fashion-inspired ambiguity could
have been appropriate for both man and woman had the world and its
expectations—as manifest in clothing, behaviors, and bodies—not de-
lineated so sharply among them.
Despite the narrator’s overt acknowledgement of Orlando’s post-
transformation difference, specifically in the way that outward signs are
executed and subsequently read, the narrative itself seems to struggle a
bit with just how much of Orlando has been altered:

Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in ev-

ery other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The
change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever
to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove,
162 Jennifer Mitchell
practically the same. His memory—but in future we must, for con-
vention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his,’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’—her memory
then, went back through all the events of her past life without en-
countering any obstacle.
(138)

Orlando’s sameness pre- and post-transformation is emphasized here;

that is, the subject who was once male is the same subject who is now
female. Of course, this synonymity is somewhat betrayed by both the
enormity of the transformation itself—as Julia Briggs explains, “psychi-
cally and structurally, Orlando’s unexplained sex change is the novel’s
central event”—and the actual substantive differences made visible by
Orlando’s biographer (201 emphasis added).
Of course, Orlando’s transition enables her to embody what Woolf’s
narrator in A Room of One’s Own (1929) uncovers as the misinformed,
albeit sharp divide between the sexes: “[i]t is fatal to be a man or woman
pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly” (104).
A Room’s narrator continues:

…whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two
sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in
order to get complete satisfaction and happiness. And I went on to
amateurishly sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two
powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain, the
man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain, the
woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable
state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritu-
ally co-operating. If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain
must have effect; and a woman must have intercourse with the man
in her.
(98)

This theory of androgyny espoused in Woolf’s treatise on the need for

women’s economic and creative security is made manifest a year before
through Orlando’s experience of both sexes in both body and mind.
As such, it is potentially useful to consider Orlando a prototype, so to
speak, of this theory of androgyny. Indeed, despite the maintenance of
memories and facial features, Orlando’s experiences as a woman in the
world are ultimately distinct from his experiences as a man. Although
the narrative itself posits the maintenance of a constant Orlando, the re-
lationship between clothing, bodies, and subjectivities becomes a telling
preoccupation:

It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a wom-

an’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only
 Fantastic Transformations 163
expressing rather more openly than usual—openness indeed was the
soul of her nature—something that happens to most people without
being thus plainly expressed.
(188–89)

Whereas once the male wardrobe was an unquestionable, inevitable, and

even thoughtless component of Orlando’s life, gendered dressing sud-
denly becomes a conscious choice with far-reaching consequences. As
Orlando’s biographer explains post-transformation, “[c]lothes are but a
symbol of something hid deep beneath” (188).
Orlando’s frustrations with the rules that govern female behavior in the
eighteenth century lead her to don clothes specifically designed for men,
rejecting the misogynistic walls of “high society” in favor of the more
democratizing space of the street. As Laura Doan explains of the cultural
context surrounding Woolf’s construction of the novel, “The meaning
of clothing in the decade after the first world war, a time of unprece-
dented cultural confusion over gender and sexual identities, was a good
deal more fluid than fixed” (96). Of course, Orlando, centuries earlier, is
more coercively tethered to sex-specific clothing and its inherent, deliber-
ate limitations; and while Woolf’s resistance to a performed masculinity
embodied by Hall is well chronicled, she ascribes to Orlando a more
liberal criticism of “feminine” clothes. The potential conflation here of
Woolf’s understanding of gender queerness and sexological n ­ otions of
inversion—that she herself seems to have actively disavowed—betrays
the influence of contemporaneously circulating theories.
While clothes, and the bodies that they sheath, are one manifestation
of Orlando’s shift in subjectivity, Orlando, based on Vita Sackville-West,
renders explicit the transition from masculine to feminine:

In making [Vita] a man who becomes a woman, Woolf may have

recalled her own initial sense of Vita’s masculinity, yet there is a fur-
ther sense in which all women begin their imaginative lives, if not as
men, then at least as unconscious of their gender, and have to learn
to think of themselves as women.
(Briggs 202)

Such is the express experience that Orlando’s biographer chronicles in the

transformation’s aftermath. And while Woolf’s criticisms of limitations
placed on women are scattered throughout the text, the novel concludes
with the resurgence of a maternal imperative—through biological repro-
duction. Further, though, the end of the novel, which “disappointed”
Vita, signifies the boundary of this experimental queer time (Briggs 209).
Orlando’s ultimate marriage, in some ways a nod to early male Orlan-
do’s hope for an idyllic love story, effectively erases ­Orlando’s capacity
for transcending the limitations of linearity. Perhaps more significantly,
164 Jennifer Mitchell
it virtually negates the radical sexual and gendered possibility that is
made explicit through Orlando’s fantastic transformation; settling into
what Briggs calls “the most patriarchal of institutions” cements her
position within the progression of time associated with family and the
domestic and, as such, Orlando’s queer subjectivity practically admits
defeat (209).
Just as queer Miss Ogilvy cannot survive in the modern world—with
its limitations on gender and sex—so too, Orlando’s potentially trans
bisexuality cannot extend indefinitely. The end of such queer possibility,
either through death or through heteronormativity, is a reminder of the
powerful inertia of the world at large. That Miss Ogilvy’s singular corpo-
real change and Orlando’s sustained bodily switch are imagined within
a few years of one another is a testament to the destabilizing yet some-
how liberating effects of World War I. Both characters are fundamen-
tally liminal, straddling the boundaries between seemingly separate and
fixed categories: male/female, now/then, alive/dead. Although Orlando’s
biographer suggests that “the present is neither a violent disruption nor
completely forgotten in the past”—a statement that could as easily ap-
ply to Miss Ogilvy, when both characters transcend the limits of mortal
chronologies—the rules and regulations associated with time are chal-
lenged (305). It is through the fantastic, then, that Hall and Woolf are
able to envision a world more conducive to and accepting of queerness.

Notes
1 Although Woolf’s fantastic “biography” Orlando (1928) was published in
the same year as Hall’s foundational lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness
(1928), only Hall’s realistic text was put on trial for obscenity.
2 Cohler connects these two texts from 1928 with a third, Compton M ­ ackenzie’s
Extraordinary Women, claiming that these three novels work to represent
women’s “homosexuality…through an oblique, direct, or metaphoric lever-
age of Britain’s decreasing global dominance as referents for their represen-
tations of female homosexuality. ‘England’ becomes the almost invisible
signifier of sexual and cultural normativity” (153). She further explains that
England is “for Woolf, a site of gender and sexual conformity” and “for Hall,
the pastoral ideal, always already centered, yet, like a vanishing horizon line,
always deferred” (153).
3 An example of a reading of Orlando that also pays particular attention to
“Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself” is Michael Kramp’s “The Resistant Social/Sex-
ual Subjectivity of Hall’s Ogilvy and Woolf’s Rhoda.”
4 Early descriptions of a young Stephen rely on her “awkward” body and
mannerisms: “Her face would grow splotched with resentment and worry;
she would feel her neck flush and her hands become awkward. Embarrassed,
she would sit staring down at her hands, which would seem to be growing
more and more awkward” (78). Further, Stephen’s father, Sir Philip, seems to
pay particular attention to the anomalous physical presence of his daughter:
But at times he would study his daughter gravely…He would watch her
at play with the dogs in the garden, watch the curious suggestion of
 Fantastic Transformations 165
strength in her movements, the long line of her limbs—she was tall for
her age—and the poise of her head on her over-broad shoulders.
(26)
5 The implicit influence of sexology here evolves into the more explicit in-
corporation of sexological texts and authors in both the narrative and the
framing of The Well of Loneliness. Stephen Gordon’s realization that her
marginalized identity has a name—and a subsequent community—is made
possible by her discovery of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s books in her father’s
study; and the novel as a whole contains a preface by Havelock Ellis, ex-
plaining the “condition” of inversion. Furthermore, Havelock Ellis explains:
The actively inverted woman usually differs from the woman of the class
just mentioned in one fairly essential character: a more or less distinct trace
of masculinity. She may not be, and frequently is not, what would be called
a ‘mannish’ woman, for the latter may imitate men on grounds of taste and
habit unconnected with sexual perversion, while in the inverted woman the
masculine traits are part of an organic instinct which she by no means al-
ways wishes to accentuate. The inverted woman’s masculine element may,
in the least degree, consist only in the fact that she makes advances to the
woman to whom she is attracted and treats all men in a cool, direct man-
ner, which may not exclude comradeship, but which excludes every sexual
relationship, whether of passion or merely of coquetry. Usually the inverted
woman feels absolute indifference toward men, and not seldom repulsion.
(222–23)
6 John D’Emilio explains the relationship between queer visibility and war:
The war severely disrupted traditional patterns of gender relations and
sexuality, and temporarily created a new erotic situation conducive to
homosexual expression. It plucked millions of young men and women,
whose sexual identities were just forming, out of their homes, out of
towns and small cities, out of the heterosexual environment of the family,
and dropped them into sex-segregated situations.
(106)
The proliferation of “Miss Ogilvies” that Hall alludes to is a testament to
this newfound queer reality.
7 Further, Gilbert explains that
where men writers primarily recounted the horrors of unleashed female
sexuality and only secondarily recorded the more generalized female
excitement that energized such sexuality, women remembered first, the
excitement of the war and, second (but more diffusely), the sensuality to
which such excitement led.
(438)
8 In some ways, this discourse embodies a violent, even nonconsensual ap-
proach to sex with the male Miss Ogilvy as the aggressor and his female
partner as his potential victim. Such a reading suggests that the aggressive
way in which male Miss Ogilvy performs sexually is acceptable only within
the confines of a prehistoric culture.
9 Dellamora explains the possibility that Miss Ogilvy is a trans character:
The phantasmatic conversion of Ogilvy from female to male lends it-
self to a postmodern transsexual reading. Her comment ‘If only I were
a man!’ suggests that she may be transsexual before the fact. Ogilvy’s
166 Jennifer Mitchell
contrary-to-fact wish, however, acknowledges that her actual body is fe-
male. And this recognition is consistent with the possibility that what she
expresses here is recognition of her existence as crossgendered.
(227)
10 Prior to this narrative moment, Orlando thinks, “Time has passed over
me…How strange it is! Nothing is any longer one thing” (304–5). Even
the seemingly straightforward account of time—that it “passed over”—is
undercut by its strangeness and its mutative possibilities.

Works Cited
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. Harcourt, Inc., 2005.
Cohler, Deborah. Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early
Twentieth-Century Britain. U of Minnesota P, 2010.
Dellamora, Richard. Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing. U of Pennsylvania
P, 2001.
D’Emilio, John. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” Powers of Desire: The Politics
of Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharan Thomp-
son, Monthly Review Press, 1983, pp. 100–113.
Doan, Laura. Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian
Culture. Columbia UP, 2001.
Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Volume I. Random House,
1936.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke
UP, 2010.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Uncanny. Translated by David ­McLintock,
Penguin, 2003, pp. 132–162.
Gilbert, Sandra M. “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the
Great War.” Signs, vol. 8, no. 3, 1993, pp. 422–450.
Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives. New York UP, 2005.
Hall, Radclyffe. “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself.” Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself.
­Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934, pp. 1–35.
———. The Well of Loneliness. 1928. Anchor Books, 1990.
Hovey, Jaime. “‘Kissing a Negress in the Dark’: Englishness as a Masquerade in
Woolf’s Orlando.” PMLA, vol. 112, no. 3, 1997, pp. 393–404.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Methuen, 1981.
Print.
Kramp, Michael. “The Resistant Social/Sexual Subjectivity of Hall’s Ogilvy
and Woolf’s Rhoda.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature,
vol. 52, no. 2, 1998, pp. 29–63.
Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. “Sexual Identity and ‘A Room of One’s Own’: ‘Secret
Economies’ in Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Discourse.” Signs, vol. 14, no. 3,
1989, pp. 634–650.
Wachman, Gay. Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties. ­Rutgers
UP, 2001.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. 1928. Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1956.
———. A Room of One’s Own. 1928. Mariner, 1989.
11 “To find my real friends I
have to travel a long way”
Queer Time Travel in
Katharine Burdekin’s
Speculative Fiction
Elizabeth English

Having traveled from thousands of years in the future, the protagonist

of Katharine Burdekin’s (1896–1963) novel, Proud Man (1934), observes
that the populace of early twentieth-century England is “never contented
with their present, [and is] … intensely interested in resurrecting their past
and trying to forecast their future” (15). The time traveler’s statement aptly
captures not only the narrative pattern of Burdekin’s work—she repeat-
edly uses history to reflect on the present and ruminate on the ­future—but
also the literary mood of the period. The interwar years in Britain wit-
nessed a surge in the publication of speculative fiction as writers crafted
utopian and dystopian worlds, distanced by geography or time, to bet-
ter understand the events of the contemporary moment and their likely
outcomes. Like that of her contemporaries, Burdekin’s literary output ex-
presses a mixture of hope and apprehension with regard to the future of
both Europe and, more widely, humanity.1 Although her first novel, Anna
Colquhoun (1922), was a realist fiction, the majority of the work that fol-
lowed pursued these concerns through speculative and fantastical modes.2
This chapter turns to three of Burdekin’s speculative works—two
rarely mentioned 1920s novels, The Burning Ring (1927) and The Rebel
Passion (1929), as well as the somewhat better attended to Proud Man,
published in 1934 under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine—to
­examine their discontent with the present moment.3 Much of the schol-
arship on Burdekin is concerned with the weft and warp of her utopian
and dystopian worlds and how these engage with debates of the day. As
a counterpoint to that, this chapter focuses less on Burdekin’s imagined
societies and more on how her characters arrive there. It examines the
importance of the journey as well as the destination and considers the
significance of time travel and the time traveler, both of which have yet to
receive scholarly attention.4 In The Burning Ring, Robert Carling finds
a magical wishing ring that allows him to travel backward in time and
to inhabit the bodies of those living in the past, as all the while he sleeps
comfortably in the present. The protagonist of The Rebel Passion is a
twelfth-century monk, Giraldus, who is chosen by a heavenly figure to
168 Elizabeth English
witness scenes of the past, present, and future in which he can participate.
In Proud Man, a nameless being from a highly evolved future society re-
turns to contemporary England to study its inhabitants and to ascertain
whether the “subhuman[s]” it finds there are in fact its ancestors (13).
This chapter argues that Burdekin uses time travel as a device to nar-
rate a series of queer bildungsromane, that is, to enable journeys of sexual
discovery and understanding for her characters. At this point, my use of
the term “queer” demands qualification since it is borrowed from a post-
modern dialect and may initially appear anachronistic when ­applied to
an early twentieth-century cultural context. Burdekin is, I claim, part of
that body of literature to which scholars refer as Lesbian or Sapphic mod-
ernism, thus we might understand her as “queer” in that sense, but my
application of the term also draws on several queer theorists’ approaches
to time.5 Burdekin’s treatment of time travel is an example of what Jack
Halberstam calls “queer time,” that is, “a term for those specific models
of temporality that … [leave] the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduc-
tion and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (6). This intro-
duces the possibility that time, or at least our conception of time and the
way in which we move through it, might be unknowingly perceived or
experienced as straight or heteronormative. Elizabeth ­Freeman employs
the term “chrononormativity” to describe “the use of time to organize
individual human bodies towards maximum p ­ roductivity … [P]eople
are bound to one another, engrouped, made to feel coherently collective,
through particular orchestrations of time” (3). She refers to the temporal
rhythms, both macro and micro, that regulate our lives and provide what
appears to be a natural structure, propelled by linear progression and fo-
cusing on growth and movement toward goals. Of course, this relies upon
assumptions about what it means to live a meaningful and productive
existence and to be a “mature” or fully developed human being. Such a
teleological narrative is undoubtedly scripted by capitalist and heteronor-
mative ideologies that encourage the individual to perceive a successful
life as one of self-improvement—that which is not static and conforms to
standardized goals such as marriage and reproduction. This is what Lee
Edelman has termed “reproductive futurism,” the investment of hopes,
dreams, and plans for the future in the abstract figure of the child:

For politics, however radical the means by which specific constit-

uencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains,
at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to
authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the fu-
ture in the form of its inner Child. That Child remains the perpetual
horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary
of every political intervention.
(2–3)
 Katharine Burdekin’s Speculative Fiction 169
Reproduction and the family, Edelman suggests, are made synony-
mous with our imagined, idealized vision of the future. Moreover, the
Child is used as political leverage or justification to achieve an array
of ideological aims; our actions in the present, we are told, must work
toward securing a future for our figurative offspring.6 Gay and lesbian
communities have historically been accused of being somehow atavistic
or regressive, disenfranchised from the future by virtue of a perceived
“nature” or “lifestyle.”7 For Edelman, this symptom of prejudice and
discrimination can be transformed into a politically radical act when
queerness refuses to invest stock in the future or to privilege the figura-
tive Child’s needs over its own:

Far from partaking of this narrative movement toward a viable polit-

ical future, far from perpetuating the fantasy of meaning’s eventual
realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of
futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social struc-
ture or form.
(4)

It is this queer “negativity,” and its refusal of the future and the social
order dependent upon it, that endows the queer individual with politi-
cal power (Edelman 4).8 With reference to this theoretical framework,
this chapter argues that Burdekin’s novels challenge the heteronorma-
tive model of time and queer our expectations of the future in order to
undermine the social order to which they are tied. In essence, Burdekin
employs time travel as a device to step outside of, but not necessar-
ily overthrow, the linear, progressive, and conventional structures of
time and to create alternative temporal opportunities that can register,
record, and experiment with gay and lesbian identities, desires, and
politics.

The Empty Present

Having returned to his own time, the protagonist of the The Burning
Ring laments that his “friends are all in dreams of the past and my own
time is empty” (229). Robert Carling’s comment is indicative of the fact
that each of Burdekin’s time travelers lives in what I term an “empty
present,” by which I mean that they are somehow at odds with the time
in which they naturally exist. They are not, we could say, “chrononor-
mative” (Freeman 3). In The Burning Ring, Carling is an artist who
adamantly refuses to consider the possibility of marriage and family;
he is in fact rather misanthropic, indifferent to those around him and
isolated from mainstream society, and although age 43, his emotional
170 Elizabeth English
life is said to have frozen at thirteen, the age at which we later find out
his mother died. The narrator of The Rebel Passion, the monk Giraldus,
is also a man with an empty or meaningless present. He is unable to be-
have in the manner expected of a son of a baron, and when he prevents
his brother from raping a peasant woman he is exiled to a Glastonbury
monastery to live out his days in isolation. He both chooses and is com-
pelled to step outside of the temporal structures of mainstream society
and to live in the static present of the monastery, a place untouched by
the movement of time or the body’s relationship with sex and repro-
duction. As a fellow monk tells Giraldus, “thou art a man born out of
due time, and there is no place for thee in the world as it is now” (9).
In Proud Man, the narrative is delivered from the perspective of a non-­
gendered, highly evolved being who has returned to the twentieth century
to study what they deem to be “subhuman” society (13). Despite their
advanced status, they express a feeling of being out of place in their
native time, “behind, or as one might put it below the rest of humanity,
and capable to some extent of subhuman feeling” (13). As is the case for
her other protagonists, the Person, by virtue of evolution, abstains from
relationships, emotional attachments, and bodily sexual exchange. As
“an entity independent of others both physically and emotionally, who is
self-fertilizing, and can produce young, if it wishes to, alone and without
help,” the Person represents a society that has rationalized relationships,
intimacy, and childbearing (22–23). These three characters, then, are
exemplar ascetics who deny emotional and physical connections to the
world; in the process they also reject, either by choice or force of cir-
cumstance, the forward pull of heteronormative time and the dominant
narrative of temporal progression inevitably focusing on reproductive
futurity.
It is evident that these characters are not at home in the present, but
time travel allows them to circumvent the normative narrative, either by
going against the grain of time’s perceived progression and returning
to the past or by skipping ahead to the future. I read this as indicative
of Burdekin’s discontent with the present, that is her recognition of the
challenges, dangers, and fears that it holds for the gay or lesbian individ-
ual, as well as her uncomfortable engagement with an emerging modern
homosexual identity. Heather Love’s study, Feeling Backward: Loss and
the Politics of Queer History (2007), examines “a tradition of queer
experience and representation” which she calls “feeling backward,” that
is “dark, ambivalent texts [that] register these authors’ painful negotia-
tion of the coming of modern homosexuality” (4). Much of Burdekin’s
work could be counted as part of this tradition in that it performs an
awkward, often judgmental negotiation with an emerging sense of what
it means to be a modern homosexual man or woman.
This conversation is heavily informed by the sexological theories of
homosexuality that were fashionable at the time. The study of sexual
 Katharine Burdekin’s Speculative Fiction 171
science, originating in the late nineteenth century and pioneered by
men such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Otto
Weininger, and Havelock Ellis, put forward a theory of homosexuality
termed “sexual inversion,” named so for the fact that inverts were sup-
posed to possess gender characteristics of the opposite sex. As Havelock
Ellis explains in his study on sexual inversion, volume two of Studies in
the Psychology of Sex (1917), “[t]he commonest characteristic of the sex-
ually inverted woman is a certain degree of masculinity or boyishness”
(244). These ideas continued to gain traction well into the twentieth
century and, though not unproblematically so, were fundamental to the
formation and cultural expression of modern gay identity. Elsewhere, I
have traced the ways in which we can observe the influence of sexology
on Burdekin’s work but for now, suffice it to say that Burdekin used the
tropes and markers of sexology throughout her work, most prominently
Ulrichs’ definition of inversion as the misalignment of soul and body.9
Ulrichs, a homosexual rights campaigner and lawyer, used the phrase
“anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa,” or a woman’s soul trapped
in a man’s body, to describe the condition of the male invert or Urning,
as he termed it (qtd. in Ellis 68). However, unlike most sexologists—and,
for that matter, modernist lesbian writers—Burdekin’s understanding
and application of inversion as a sexual discourse could be described
as puritanical, even somatophobic, in its distaste of the body’s sensual
needs. Robert Carling is punished by the magical ring—it burns him
when he indulges in any physical vice, be that alcohol or lust. Giraldus
is told in no uncertain terms that although God approves of his inverted
soul he cannot explore that identity in a sexual manner, and the utopian
future that the Child of God reveals to the monk in his final vision is
one where all people aspire to chastity. Similarly, the Person represents
a society that has no biological need for sex. This is a complicated por-
trayal of modern homosexuality marked by shame and guilt regarding
the physical expression of that identity, and Burdekin’s texts consistently
evince a belief that sexuality should be a spiritual rather than a corpo-
real experience, that it should involve the union of souls and not bod-
ies. It is the fantastic mode that liberates Burdekin both temporally and
ideologically: conjuring up images of the past and future unbeholden to
the constraints of reality, she is able to carve out an alternative vision for
sexuality.

Dreaming the Past

It is because of their inability to synchronize with the present time and
its conventional, heteronormative rhythms that these characters travel
to the past, where they instead find freedom, understanding, and self-
worth. Burdekin’s characters’ precise method of time travel is significant
to this discussion because it is again testament to her wider interests
172 Elizabeth English
and reading habits. Both Robert Carling and the Person travel to the
past for months or years at a time through dreams, although little or no
time passes in reality. While this might strike us as occult in origin, Bur-
dekin was interested in scientific discussions of time, of which there were
many in this period. The popularization of Albert Einstein’s ideas in
the 1920s, specifically his theory of relativity, had a significant cultural
impact, as did Henri Bergson’s philosophical approach to the subject.
But in this instance Burdekin draws on the work of aeronautical engi-
neer and aviator, J. W. Dunne and more specifically his bestselling book
An Experiment with Time (1927), which we can say with certainty she
possessed and read.10 Victoria Stewart states that Dunne’s work “struck
a chord with contemporary readers,” evidenced by the fact that it was
“reprinted throughout the 1930s, and implicit and explicit references to
his work … [appear] in numerous literary works in the inter-war years”
(63). The dates of Burdekin’s novels coincide with the publication of and
vogue for Dunne’s ideas and given the speed at which Burdekin worked
(notably, she did not revise her writing), it is feasible that she may have
been exposed to Dunne’s theories before publishing the first of these
three texts.
Dunne’s An Experiment with Time begins with an account of his
own prescient dreams, anticipating among other things a Paris factory
fire, a volcanic eruption, and an acquaintance’s death. He insists that
these are not occult happenings or predictions of the future, but rather
dreams “merely displaced in time” (44). Drawing on the work of other
scientists and philosophers, he sees these dreams as a prompt to embark
upon an experiment “to discover some hitherto overlooked peculiarity
in the structure of Time” (49). Dunne’s belief is that the past, pres-
ent, and future are coterminous and that only consciousness prevents
us from accessing any state apart from the present. Reflecting on the
possibility that his experiences are in fact normal, he surmises that this
must mean:

That the universe was, after all, really stretched out in Time, and
that the lop-sided view we had of it—a view with the ‘future’ part
unaccountably missing, cut off from the growing ‘past’ part by
a travelling ‘present moment’—was due to a purely mentally im-
posed barrier which existed only when we were awake? So that,
in reality, the associational network stretched, not merely this
way and that way in Space, but also backwards and forwards in
Time; and the dreamer’s attention, following in natural, unhin-
dered fashion the easiest pathway among the ramifications, would
be continually crossing and recrossing that properly non-existent
equator which we, waking, ruled quite arbitrarily athwart the
whole.
(54)
 Katharine Burdekin’s Speculative Fiction 173
Dunne’s suggestion, then, is that we can access the past and future
through altered consciousness. Dunne limits this theory to our own
individual timelines (the news or events we are bound to encounter),
whereas Burdekin allows characters free reign through space and time,
but she was undoubtedly influenced by his ideas when she conceived her
time travel narratives. Her protagonists articulate temporal theories that
echo Dunne’s own philosophy. Robert Carling, trying to explain what
appears to be his gift of prophecy (simply a knowledge of history), states
that “[i]n all time there is me, in all time there is you. But I think that
only once are we on earth” (193). Giraldus also contemplates the impli-
cations of his time travelling visions when the Child of God tells him
that time is “an illusion, a fancy” and wonders “why should not man, by
virtue of the breath of God in him, also overcome time and space and see
all times together, past, present and future” (63, 65). Perhaps the most
interesting challenge to the concept of time comes from Proud Man’s
Person, whose critique of subhuman time is worth quoting at length:

When we had finished our meal I asked her what she wished to do
next, knowing that subhumans like their actions to follow one after
the other without any pause between. They are not capable of being
quiet and letting time flow by them … Their ideal of a successful
man is one who fills the unforgiving (hostile) minute, a small par-
ticle of time, with sixty seconds (sixty still smaller particles) worth
of distance run, no matter where; because a man of that sort has
laid that enemy minute by, permanently dead and on its back like
a beetle, so that it can never come at him again with hostile vigour
and make him feel guilt in the memory of it. Wasted minutes, that
is to say, minutes in which no distance has been run, return to sting
them like swarms of bees, or clot into heaps and fall on their heads
as wasted weeks, months, or even years.
(163)

The Person deems our own method of understanding time to be arti-

ficial, a false cutting up of time. But more than just a criticism of our
system of measurement, our approach to time proves to be a damning
indictment of society’s character. The successful and productive subhu-
man is one who attempts to kill time, to stand victorious over it by
filling their minutes, hours, and days to the brim with meaningless en-
deavor. Burdekin’s characters reject a sense of time as progressive and
engage with alternative temporal theories; the consequence of this is that
they reject a normative life—in critiquing the way in which we “use”
time the characters thus challenge the social order and convention that
it supports.
For these protagonists, a journey through time allows for a pro-
cess of self-discovery that is deemed impossible in the present moment.
174 Elizabeth English
The Burning Ring comprises four episodes of nonchronological time travel:
the first to the day on which Robert Carling lost his mother, the second
to the time of Rome’s invasion of Britain, the third to the reign of Charles
the Second, and finally to the reign of Elizabeth the First. The middle two
episodes, during which Robert forms close bonds with a Roman soldier and
then with King Charles himself, make up the majority of the novel and it
is through these relationships that he begins to unlock emotions hitherto
inaccessible. As he explains to his friend in the present, “[i]t’s only in the
dreams I can love, it is only in the dreams I’m really myself” (249). Time
travel, then, enables him to discover his identity, or what he perceives as
his true self, and central to this is his relationship with other men. Pamela
Thurschwell notes that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
the occult allowed writers “to create phantasmatic spaces in which they
redefine[d] intimate, sexual, familial and national ties between people,”
and while this is not an example of occult practice per se, the principle
still applies (2). Time travel allows for an adjustment to modes of intimacy,
to the breaking down of the usual barriers between bodies and minds. In
three of Robert Carling’s time travels, he inhabits male bodies and in two
instances he uses those bodies to form relationships with other men.11
Consciously travelling to another time while knowing a return to present
is possible provides liberty from the constraints of actual life, but of course
inhabiting another body, taking it over, is itself an erotic act. Although the
relationships that Robert Carling builds with these men are not explicitly
sexual, they are certainly homoromantic. He explicitly states that he loves
each of these men and feels a deep sense of loss and grief, a “wild longing,”
when he is forced to return to the present without them (89). After his time
with Marcus Valerius, he “longed for his large-boned, large-brained, stern
and overbearing comrade, [and] he knew that in the twelve days’ march
through the perilous forests of Cornwall he had found a happiness he had
never known before” (89). Robert Carling attests to the fact that only
time travel (and therefore only a fantastic premise) will allow him to forge
such homoromantic and erotic bonds, since as he states, “[t]o find my real
friends I have to travel a long way” (156).
In The Rebel Passion, time travel also enables the protagonist to gain
greater insight into his sexual identity, although this is not through direct
relationships with other men. As part of this journey through time, he is
witness to his own birth at which he is given a woman’s soul. ­Giraldus is
at first angered by what he views as an act of betrayal by God:

I thought of … the incessant warfare and struggle there is between

the soul and the body that is not fitting for it, the body it hates. I
thought of the scorn and the mocking, the loneliness and the hell of
misunderstanding. I thought of the temptations to black error which
had been mine.
(57)
 Katharine Burdekin’s Speculative Fiction 175
Here Burdekin literalizes the sexological metaphor of inverted souls to
provide Giraldus with an origin narrative. While on the one hand this
legitimizes and sanctifies his sexuality—it is after all God-given—it is
also another example of Love’s “feeling backward,” marked as it is by a
sense of shame and alienation (4). Giraldus is comforted by his discovery
that there are others like him but he also longs to know when the world
will cease to “despise them and reject them, and judge them harshly
for their sins” (59). Two thousand years in the future men and women
like Giraldus, inverts, will be understood as “[t]he chosen servants of
Christ” (60). Although this anticipated moment of acceptance endorses
only a spiritual homosexuality—Giraldus is told that “there will always
be some who cannot eat the sweet apple without sin”—again evidencing
Burdekin’s tendency toward asceticism, it endows Giraldus with a sense
of community, one that is notably atemporal (60). After seeing a woman
he mistakes for a boy (in this future men and women dress alike), he
weeps because he has finally found a time in which he can be at home
and openly declare his identity:

I shall not be beaten for what I am. I know that if I called out in this
England as it is now—‘I am a man with the soul of a woman’—they
would say—‘Then the better priest thou shalt be.’ But oh, Child, we
have been beaten in other times.
(268)

When the present is empty, when it can only offer shame and violence,
time travel enables Giraldus, and perhaps sympathetic contemporary
readers, to look to a future that may be better and to access an atempo-
ral community in which he can acknowledge and proclaim his identity
without fear of reprisals.12

Queering the Future

Lee Edelman’s response to the exclusion of the gay and lesbian commu-
nities from reproductive futurism is to promote a politics of negativity
and pessimism, an outright refusal of the future:

For by figuring a refusal of the coercive belief in the paramount

value of futurity, while refusing as well any backdoor hope for dia-
lectical access to meaning, the queer dispossesses the social order of
the ground on which it rests: a faith in the consistent reality of the
social—and by extension, of the social subject.
(6)

The political power of the queer, according to Edelman, is in its embrace

of this rejection, since this undermines the social order as well as any
176 Elizabeth English
illusion of a stable or cohesive identity autonomous from that order. At
first glance, Burdekin’s characters appear to refuse the future by sacrific-
ing themselves to the act of time travel. While no time passes for Robert
Carling when he dreams himself into the past, his body ages dispro-
portionately. Despite the mental and physical toll of these journeys he
continues to return to the past at his own risk, acknowledging that this
will most likely shorten his life. Giraldus, while not physically fatigued
in the same way, is indelibly marked by all that he has seen and dedicates
his remaining life to keeping a record of his visions. However, Burdekin
does not reject the future in such a wholesale way as Edelman, nor does
she see such a rejection as politically enabling, but her choice of a fantasy
genre and use of time travel allow her to manipulate the conventional
temporal narratives (reproductive and otherwise) in order to reimagine
rather than outright deny the future.13
Most significantly, Burdekin’s vision of the future resists heteronorma-
tivity in the sense that no hope is placed in the next generation or in the
figure of the Child as a symbol of change. Reform of family structures
and reproductive processes are pivotal to social revolution in B ­ urdekin’s
work, as seen most explicitly in Proud Man and The End of This Day’s
Business (written in 1935 but unpublished until 1989), both of which
reimagine biological and cultural reproductive norms. The Person rep-
resents a species that no longer requires dyadic relationships to repro-
duce, while the futuristic society in The End of This Day’s Business
excludes the father from the family structure in all but the most basic bi-
ological sense. Crucially, instead of the Child and the family, Burdekin’s
work invests hope in the queer figure of the sexual invert as a prophet
and a revolutionary. This vision for the future of humanity is likely influ-
enced by Edward Carpenter’s evolutionary theory, which espoused that
sexual inverts, what he called the “Intermediate Sex,” held a privileged
place in society by virtue of their dual gendered state.14 The disparity
between their soul and body was for Carpenter evidence of a higher state
of consciousness and thus a more evolved existence:

The double life and nature certainly, in many cases of inverts ob-
served today, seems to give to them an extraordinary humanity and
sympathy, together with a remarkable power of dealing with human
beings. It may possibly also point to a further degree of evolution
than usually attained, and a higher order of consciousness, very im-
perfectly realised, of course, but indicated.
(Intermediate Types 63)

For Carpenter and Burdekin alike, it is these individuals, marginalized

and derided, who can further the development of society and even the
evolution of the species. Far from sterile, these individuals bear children
of a different kind:
 Katharine Burdekin’s Speculative Fiction 177
It certainly does not seem impossible to suppose that as the ordi-
nary love has a special function in the propagation of the race, so
the other has its special function in social and heroic work, and in
the generation—not of bodily children—but of those children of the
mind, the philosophical conceptions and ideals which transform our
lives and those of society.
(Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex 70)

Thus, again, children produced from heteronormative unions are deval-

ued in favor of alternative, intellectual, and political fecundity.
What Burdekin is really doing here is exploring and negotiating the
process of evolution and its relationship to reproduction and futurity. By
this point, Charles Darwin’s paradigm-shifting theories of evolution and
natural selection, as outlined in his 1859 publication On the Origin of
Species, were culturally pervasive, as evidenced when Giraldus travels to
the beginning of life on Earth:

The vision was of the earth alone by itself, and it was not the flaming
hot molten mass but cool … and on its surface was slime. Minutes
passed, and things began to move and crawl in the slime. Minutes, I
said, but whether minutes or thousands of years, or millions, I could
not tell, for in the visions time was not.
(23)

He similarly witnesses the accelerated advancement of beast to man,

therefore seeing evolution play out before his eyes. Notably, this is not
deemed to be in contravention to the religious premise of the novel and
it is specifically God’s gift of the soul that finally makes man human,
so combining both scientific and religious philosophies (24). Burdekin
does, then, embrace a teleological narrative of human advancement, one
which is underpinned by conventional ideas of growth and progress.
The future is framed as a positive and desirable space into which we
must inevitably evolve as a species. This grates against the fact that, as
Heather Love states,

[w]hether understood as throwbacks to an earlier stage of human

development or as children who refuse to grow up, queers have been
seen across the twentieth century as a backward race. Perverse,
immature, sterile, and melancholic: even when they provoke fears
about the future, they somehow also recall the past.
(6)

Even the term “inversion,” wielded by sexologists to defend homosex-

uality, implies a turning backward or inward. Burdekin’s speculative
worlds are radical, then, because they offer an inverted, or queer, vision
178 Elizabeth English
of our evolution, one that, unlike Darwin’s evolutionary model, is not
driven by biological reproduction and that absolutely dispels the myth
that homosexuality is regressive, atavistic or immature. Essentially for
Burdekin, the invert, rather than the child, is the future of the species.
In The Rebel Passion, the final vision of the future (in the thirty-­
second century) offers an improved but only “half perfect” world (305).
Certainly, this appears to be an equal and fair society, but the Child
of God hints at a time further in the future when everyone will “have
souls like Giraldus” (258). Given that Giraldus’ sexuality is understood
through the inversion of his soul we might legitimately read this to imply
that the truly advanced society is made up of people like Giraldus. The
Person repeats this vision of the future in Proud Man when discussing
marriage reform with one of his hosts, Leonora. The Person suggests
that were heterosexual relationships to become the union of true equals,
their offspring might bring about an evolutionary step change because
“with such perfect understanding between the parents children might in
time be born who united the whole natures of the lovers in themselves,
even to their sexes” (191–92). It is again the invert—or at least a figure
that possesses their gendered duality—who represents what the Person
calls human adulthood. Homosexuality, in its spiritual incarnation at
least, is not perceived as immaturity or backwardness, something to be
grown out of or surpassed; it is in itself an end goal of human progress.
More radical still is the fact that in these imagined futures, evolution
as a concept has been discarded. As the Person explains, the people of
the future:

do not know what they have evolved from, because their evolution,
if any, has been so slow that all stages of it have been forgotten, and
all records lost. That is to say, if they did evolve, they reached a pe-
riod when they completely lost all interest in what you call history.
They have no history. But it seems likely that they are now fully
evolved, adult, and therefore perfect.
(194–95)

If macro narratives of time are rendered meaningless in the future—

this society has no sense of where they have been or where they are
going—then judgments of a society’s progress presumably become im-
possible. If the passing of time is no longer measured and their focus is
purely on living in the present moment (as the Person tells us it is), then
the inhabitants of this futuristic society have no relationship to futurity
or the arguably heteronormative values it inscribes. The fact that this
highly evolved utopian society has no formalized system for understand-
ing temporality, indicates that time—or to be more accurate the values
embedded within time, in essence the social order—is anathema to the
realization of true equality of all kinds.
 Katharine Burdekin’s Speculative Fiction 179
Fantasy fiction is often dismissed for being somehow frivolous or es-
capist but these novels are testament to the way in which generic de-
vices can be put to radical use. Time travel allows Burdekin to express
discontent with the present, to expose it as an “empty” or meaningless
time for the queer individual. It is in this sense that time travel is a po-
litical act, a refusal to be content with or suffer the way things are. Her
characters turn to the past for solace and better understanding of their
identities but her most potent statement undoubtedly comes in relation
to the future. I began this chapter with a brief foray into queer theorists’
challenges to the concept of time and specifically the idea of rejecting
the future. Can one write utopian (or for that matter dystopian) fiction
without having some investment in the future? The genre, and utopian
thought more generally, is predicated on the belief that society can or
must change and improve, so arguably not. Burdekin does not reject the
future outright but she does radicalize and queer it through her use of
the fantastic. These texts demonstrate recognition that the experience of
time is not neutral or objective; it is in fact wedded to social order and
convention. As she states in Proud Man, people expect to use time in a
certain way to be deemed “successful.” That said, she does not wholly
abandon a progressive model of time; she does, however, strip this model
of its attachment to heteronormativity. Unlike the Darwinian paradigm
which sees life as driven and improved by biological change and het-
erosexual reproduction, Burdekin privileges an alternative spiritual and
intellectual evolution, signaling a shift away from the body to the soul,
led by the queer figure of the invert. In Burdekin’s utopian futures, con-
cepts of time, history, and evolution are defunct, and while that might
be the ideal scenario which we strive toward, in the meantime her time
travel narratives encourage readers to understand that normative time
correlates to a normative life and that both demand interrogation.

Notes
1 One of her preoccupations in this period is the increasing likelihood of a
second conflict, explored later and most fully in her 1937 dystopian novel
Swastika Night, which imagines a world living with the long-reaching ram-
ifications of Hitler’s possible victory.
2 Quiet Ways (1930) and Anna Colquhoun (1922), as well as a number of un-
published manuscripts, were written in the realist mode. Burdekin published
her final work, Venus in Scorpio: A Romance of Versailles, 1770–1793,
in 1940. After this date she continued to write but no longer published her
work.
3 Burdekin published Proud Man (1934), The Devil, Poor Devil! A Novel
(1934), Swastika Night (1937), and Venus in Scorpio: A Romance of Ver-
sailles, 1770–1793 (1940) under the same pseudonym. As Daphne Patai ex-
plains, this disguise was chosen, according to her family, “to protect her
children against possible repercussions from the overtly engaged and strik-
ingly antifascist tone of her fiction” (321).
180 Elizabeth English
4 Alexis Lothian’s recent article reads Swastika Night through queer theories
of antifuturism and argues that Burdekin’s representation of dystopian re-
production is an example of “feminist negativity” (469). My own chapter
refers to queer theories of time and futurity but specifically considers the
significance of time travel and the time traveler as fantastic tropes.
5 For my positioning of Burdekin as Lesbian Modernist, see English, Lesbian
Modernism.
6 Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work on the “queer child” is also relevant to this
discussion.
7 See Love and Halberstam on this point.
8 It is worth noting that other queer theorists disagree with Edelman’s ap-
proach and what José Esteban Muñoz terms the “antirelational thesis” (11).
See, for instance, Muñoz and Snediker.
9 See English, Lesbian Modernism and “Lesbian Modernism and Utopia.”
In this work I trace the 1930s epistolary friendship between Burdekin and
the sexologist Havelock Ellis to make a case for the significance of sexol-
ogy in Burdekin’s writing. Drawing on archival research, I argue that in
response to the literary censorship of the 1920s, and more specifically the
ban of Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, Burdekin used
speculative (rather than realist) fiction to explore lesbian and gay sexuali-
ties. ­Burdekin’s utopian protagonists are modeled on sexological identities,
but her use of fantasy is not simply about disguising non-heteronormative
desires; for B­ urdekin the invert is a hopeful figure and she uses speculative
fiction to negotiate a utopian vision for the future of sexuality.
10 Daphne Patai, whose work is fundamental to our understanding of
­Burdekin, kindly shared with me her notes of conversations between herself
and ­Burdekin’s companion that took place as part of Patai’s research in the
1980s. In these notes, Patai records Burdekin’s interest in Dunne’s book
along with a few other time travel novels, including Margaret Irwin’s Still
She Wished for Company (1924) and Ford Maddox Ford’s Ladies Whose
Bright Eyes: A Romance (1911).
11 Admittedly, in his third journey into the past he falls in love with a woman,
but he initially mistakes her for male and she is conventionally masculine in
both appearance and interests. She even laments that “[i]t is a pity that I am
not a boy” (The Burning Ring 291).
12 It is worth noting that many of Burdekin’s novels feature male protagonists
and male relationships, despite her consistent focus on feminist politics. The
reasons behind this deserve more detailed examination than possible here,
but can be in part explained by the fact that sexology, though not originally
positioned as such, is a theory of transgenderism as well as homosexuality
(both Prosser and Taylor posit this in relation to Hall’s The Well of Lone-
liness). Burdekin’s female characters are often physically masculine, both
biologically and by chosen style. The Rebel Passion imagines a future when
the species has evolved so that
women [are] more nearly the size of the men … Their muscle of body
had developed so much that their waists had disappeared, and now they
were broad-shouldered, broad-hipped and broad in the waist, so that
they looked very sturdy and thick-set.
(237)

What this demonstrates is Burdekin’s privileging of masculine female iden-
tities and a belief that our evolutionary trajectory toward a more genderless
 Katharine Burdekin’s Speculative Fiction 181
state involves a move away from femininity toward masculinity. As I have
argued elsewhere, this is indicative of the fact that Burdekin’s work is also
“a narrative of gender dysphoria and transgenderism” (2015, 51).
13 In regard to Swastika Night, Lothian believes that Burdekin refuses to “ei-
ther embrace or repudiate this negativity” (446).
14 Elsewhere, I have more fully explored the connection between Carpenter
and Burdekin. See English, Lesbian Modernism.

Works Cited
Burdekin, Katharine. The Burning Ring. 1927. Readers League of America,
1941.
———. The End of This Day’s Business. Feminist Press at the CUNY, 1989.
———. Proud Man. 1934. Feminist Press at the CUNY, 1993.
Burdekin, Kay [Katharine Burdekin]. The Rebel Passion. William Morrow,
1929.
Carpenter, Edward. The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types
of Men and Women. Swan Sonnenschein, 1908.
———. Intermediate Types among Primitive Folk: A Study in Social Evolution.
1914. 2nd edition, Allen & Unwin, 1919.
Dunne, J. W. An Experiment with Time. A. & C. Black, 1927.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004.
Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume II Sexual Inversion.
1897. F. A. Davies, 1917.
English, Elizabeth. Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fic-
tion. Edinburgh UP, 2015.
———. “Lesbian Modernism and Utopia: Sexology and the Invert in Katha-
rine Burdekin’s Fiction.” Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the
­Twentieth-Century, edited by Alice Reeve Tucker and Nathan Waddell,
­Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 93–110.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke
UP, 2010.
Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives. New York UP, 2005.
Lothian, Alexis. “A Speculative History of No Future: Feminist Negativity and
the Queer Dystopian Impulses of Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night.” Po-
etics Today, vol. 37, no. 3, 2016, pp. 443–72.
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History.
­Harvard UP, 2007.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.
New York UP, 2009.
Patai, Daphne. “Foreword” and “Afterword.” Proud Man. 1934, edited
by Katharine Burdekin, Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993, pp. ix–xxiv and
pp. 319–50.
Prosser, Jay, “‘Some Primitive Thing Conceived in a Turbulent Age of Transi-
tion’: The Transsexual Emerging from The Well.” Palatable Poison: Criti-
cal Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, edited by Laura Doan and Jay
Prosser, Columbia UP, 2001, pp. 129–44.
182 Elizabeth English
Snediker, Michael D. Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous
Persuasions. U of Minnesota P, 2009.
Stewart, Victoria. “J.W. Dunne and Literary Culture in the 1930s and 1940s.”
Literature & History, vol. 17, no. 2, 2008, pp. 62–81.
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the
­Twentieth Century. Duke UP, 2009.
Taylor, Melanie A. “‘The Masculine Soul Heaving in the Female Bosom’: The-
ories of Inversion and The Well of Loneliness.” Journal of Gender Studies,
vol. 7, no. 3, 1998, pp. 287–96.
Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking,
1880–1920. Cambridge UP, 2001.
Section IV

Invitation to Dissidence
Fantastic Creatures
Jessica DeCoux

Various cultural changes at the fin de siècle spurred urgent reconsider-

ations of many kinds of “others.” Innovations in transportation, along
with a period of sustained and increasing colonialism, fostered an anx-
ious fascination with the foreign or exotic stranger. Industrialization and
urbanization (and the proliferation of the translated works of Karl Marx)
ignited a deeper attention to class disparities and the plight of the working
poor. Post-Darwinian scientific communities explored the implications of
evolution, and thus of devolution and abnormality, with their terrifying
implications of societal collapse. These conversations are inextricable both
from each other and from discussions of the “woman question” and related
debates on gender and sexuality that raged contemporaneously. Even as the
reckoning of these various forms of otherness engendered deep anxieties,
so too did they offer a framework for enticing considerations of difference.
Many of the most enduring literary creatures—fantastic, monstrous,
grotesque, or otherworldly—from the period, including those examined
in the following chapters, embody several forms of otherness at once.
These representations are, therefore, unavoidably multivalent; the exis-
tence of each type of otherness acts to metaphorize the others, resulting in
a generative cross-pollination. For example, in H. Rider Haggard’s 1886
novel She, the femininity of the title character, Ayesha, acts as a meta-
phorical lens to conceptualize the exoticized and subjugated East, while
foreignness becomes a lens to conceptualize the plight of the oppressed
and objectified woman, and both characterizations function as a means
to problematize historical progress and the precarious ascendancy of the
British Empire. Is She, then, a story about women masquerading as a
story of the East, or vice versa? In both interpretations, actual difference
is concealed under the guise of the figurative. There is no single answer
to what fantastic creatures in literature really are, so there is also no sin-
gle answer to what they really mean. They simultaneously reveal and
conceal, relying on traditional racially and socially coded significations
of good and evil even as they work concomitantly to thwart and subvert
such significations. Therefore, these fantastic creatures often act as potent
yet malleable symbols of the sinister, the unknowable, or the “unnatural”
other, but also act as figures of liberation, as representatives of the unre-
stricted or the transgressive that impede scrutiny through illegibility.
184 Jessica DeCoux
In this way, fin-de-siècle fantasy fiction was useful not only for reject-
ing the materialism of naturalism and realism, and for merging scientific
discourses with imaginative ones, but also for encouraging “against-
the-grain” readings, inviting the reader to focus attention away from
the protagonist and onto a mysterious other, or supplanting traditional
protagonists with subversive ones. Although these aims are often closely
associated with the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, and with the
small, erudite audiences they supposedly cultivated, novels featuring
fantastic creatures achieved similar effects by offering multiple inter-
pretive possibilities and opportunities for identification to a broad and
increasingly varied Victorian readership.
These same characters and literary gestures became eminently useful
again in the 1920s as the post-World War I populace turned its attention
back to conceptualizations of identity that were more individualistic than
nationalistic, even as it sought to give expression to wartime trauma. The
exploration of otherness and alienation occasioned by ever-­increasing
urbanization and industrialization, a concern that had remained rele-
vant since the nineteenth century, was again on the minds of peacetime
authors. The rising popularity of Sigmund Freud’s work also gave fan-
tastical and monstrous characters new layers of signification: they were,
of course, expressions of the untamable unconscious, the intrusions of
that which is repressed and ungovernable, and were therefore even more
potent embodiments of extra-social liberation. Furthermore, fantastic
creatures’ simultaneous legibility and illegibility reproduced the psycho-
analytic patient’s process of decoding the overdetermined symbols pop-
ulating the unconscious mind. Freud theorized that the unheimlich, or
“uncanny,” as embodied by the fantastic figure, is a personification of
our own intrusive repressed thoughts and desires, and like these things it
both demands and resists apprehension. Thus, the multiple significations
of the fantastic figure not only serve as a protective interpretive layer
preventing that character’s subjectification within the world of the novel
and the mind of the reader, but they are also fruitful tools for depicting
a fractured and self-alienated model of personhood, for lamenting the
necessarily repressive relationship between individual and society, and
for delineating the limits of literature’s liberating potential.
The essays that follow here expose not only the particular social con-
cerns that inform the composition of fantastic creatures, but also the in-
vitation to dissidence held within them. These explicitly feminist readings
often view traditionally “villainous” characters with sympathy or divorce
a character’s death or expulsion from the text from any implication of
authorial judgment or condemnation. For Colleen Morrissey, it is neither
the male protagonist nor the secondary character of the woman author,
but rather the relatively marginal character of Satan who acts as the true
mouthpiece for Marie Corelli’s iconoclastic philosophy in her novel The
Sorrows of Satan (1895). The character allows Corelli a shield of distance
 Invitation to Dissidence 185
and plausible deniability, even as she implicitly compares Satan’s sorrows
to her own thwarted position as a popular woman novelist. Tellingly,
the two scholars who here turn their attention to the second era under
consideration in this collection, the 1920s, reckon more directly with
the limitations on the freedom offered by (and experienced by) female
fantastic creatures, resulting in part from their very human reproductive
capacity. The biological exigencies of maternity function in these later
stories as a marker of legibility that subjects the female body to patriar-
chal discernment and regulation as well as physical danger. Lizzie Harris
McCormick compares feminist werewolf tales from both eras, Clemence
Housman’s The Were-Wolf (1896) and Aino Kallas’s The Wolf’s Bride
(1928), and finds that lupine embodiment offers women tremendous
physical liberation—including erotic self-determination and trans or
liminal gender states. However, the ambiguous heroic victory offered by
Housman’s earlier story is diluted by Kallas’s tale, in which an alternate
realm of wildness and untrammeled pleasure, both sexual and physical, is
ultimately subject to the world’s judgments and punishments once issues
of maternity emerge. Kate Schnur examines the fantastic story-within-a-
story elements of Djuna Barnes’s Ryder (1928) and finds that, while they
offer a vision of ostensible sexual freedom, they are still co-opted by a
masculine authorial voice and provide no fruitful imaginative ground for
the young girl hearing them. Indeed, the story’s ten-breasted monster, an
animalistic grotesquerie of fecundity, dies in childbirth, echoing the cold
facts of her environment wherein women have no purpose beyond their
sexual and reproductive ones, and die frequently in those processes.
These readings are not only feminist revisions or reclamations; they are
very much in keeping with the spirit of the texts themselves. These charac-
ters’ bestiality, monstrousness, foreignness, or immortality contextualizes
the otherness of their female embodiment, even as it masks it. They lever-
age, in Corelli’s case, the frankness afforded by masculinity, or explore, in
Housman’s and Kallas’s, transitory gender and species roles, while Barnes
makes female subjugation both divine and grotesque through her crea-
ture’s plot. Despite their varying levels of optimism regarding the prospect
of unfettered female liberation, all offer heterodox models of femininity,
and all expose the radical potential that has always existed at the root of
popular, and populist, stories of fantastic and monstrous creatures.

Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete
­Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII: An Infantile Neuro-
sis and Other Works, edited by James Strachey. Translated by James Strachey
and Anna Freud, Hogarth Press, 1981, pp. 219–256.
Haggard, H. Rider. She. 1886. Dodo Press, 2009.
12 Rewriting the Romantic Satan
The Sorrows and Cynicism of
Marie Corelli
Colleen Morrissey

As popular literary forms gain greater scholarly standing, critics have be-
gun to recognize the cultural importance of fin-de-siècle novelist Marie
Corelli. Routinely outstripping the sales of contemporaries like Rudyard
Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle by tens of thousands of yearly book
sales, her magnum opus, a novel called The Sorrows of Satan, broke
all previous English records during its initial sale in 1895 (Federico 6).
As Annette R. Federico puts it, “It was the first modern bestseller, and
it was read by everyone, from noblemen to scullery maids” (7). ­Critics
have focused on this novel not only because of its massive popular suc-
cess but because the narrative’s preoccupation with the politics of the
literary marketplace shows us so much about being a female author in
a male-dominated field.1 Many of these same scholars have seen the
novel’s authoress character, Mavis Clare, as Corelli’s narcissistic mouth-
piece, her tool for lambasting her critics and setting herself up as the
high priestess of morally upright art. I contend, however, that Corelli
actually appropriates the suffering male archetype of Satan as her avatar
in the novel in order to interrogate the interrelated problems of Christi-
anity and patriarchy. As a direct portrayal of female authorship, M ­ avis
Clare is too hemmed in by gender and literary market constrictions to
make the kind of existential critique Corelli wanted to voice at this point
in her career as a bestseller loved by the public yet rejected by the literati.
­Corelli’s revision of the figure of Satan, however, reveals the ­double-voice
with which she operated, articulating through refracted and complex
circuits the pain of an outcast soothsayer.
A character whose literary tradition enables heterodoxy, Satan pro-
vides an unexpected but highly effective vehicle through which Corelli
can rehabilitate her own outcast status. Rather than employing the Gothic
trope of the demonic human character, Corelli invokes the fantastical
Satanic archetype as a way to tap into a simultaneously empowered-­yet-
martyred, self-screening-yet-egoistic persona. In the rest of her oeuvre,
Corelli frequently features female characters with supernatural powers,
such as the astral-projecting narrator in her debut A R ­ omance of Two
Worlds (1886). Corelli’s revisions of the classic Satanic figure, however,
provide a lens which these female characters cannot—a perspective that
 Rewriting the Romantic Satan 187
is cynical, even perverse, but still sanctified. The necessary double-speak
and contradictions of Satan allow Corelli to maintain a connection to
mainstream Christianity while also espousing views more heterodox
than the occultist heterodoxy of Theosophy and spiritualism. 2 Rather
than ally herself with what she derisively refers to as “Blavatskyism,
­Besantism and hypnotism” and thus lose the opportunity to build a cult
centered on her beliefs exclusively, Corelli remakes and then claims the
position of the outcast authority (Sorrows 36).3
In addition to rejecting other fin-de-siècle alternative spirituali-
ties, Corelli refused communion with the very New Woman novelists
the academy would later canonize. Unwittingly forecasting how the
twentieth-­century academy would ignore her in favor of her more rad-
ical contemporaries, she deplored the critical and commercial success
of the likes of Ouida and George Sand, whose books she considered
morally damaging (Letters, 26 March 1887).4 She saw herself, like the
neo-­Romantic Satan she created, as totally alone—and remarkable in
her singularity. The notion that Satan’s outcast position is a perversely
glamorous one did not arise with the dawn of Christianity but rather in
the early modern period. After the publication of Milton’s Paradise Lost
in 1667, Satan became a Romantic character who epitomized righteous
isolation and intellectual pessimism. As Percy Bysshe Shelley put it, S­ atan
“perseveres in some purposes which he has conceived to be excellent in
spite of adversity and torture” (qtd. in Steadman 259). For Byron, it is Sa-
tan’s very “intensity of consciousness… that constitutes the alienated self:
knowledge as alienation” (Parker 1–2). Satan’s alienation was recast as
proof of his possession of ultimate, painful truth, while his coterie of fel-
low demon-rebels “are fallen creatures…but tremendous in their fallen-
ness: they can neither altogether regret what they have become, because
of the dark knowledge which they now possess, nor reconcile themselves
to their condition” (Parker 2). Like the Romantics two generations before
her, Corelli considered herself a cast-out genius with the wounds to show
for it. However, unlike the male Romantics, C ­ orelli’s position was con-
strained by her gender. Instead of being persecuted by Philistines, as they
saw themselves, Corelli felt persecuted by jealous male writers not only as
punishment for the high regard she had for her own work but also for the
sins of being unsubtle and “hyperfeminine” yet successful (Federico 5).
Her frustration was notably demonstrated in her refusal to send The
Sorrows of Satan to reviewers, who had proven they would eviscerate her
work no matter what. Though she merited praise from some, many crit-
ics had made a sport of “slashing” the seven novels that appeared before
Sorrows, calling her spiritual ideas “ridiculous” and her writing itself
“tedious and exaggerated,” even “repulsive” (Ransom 36, 60). “Mem-
bers of the press,” Corelli wrote in a special notice at the beginning of
Sorrows, “will therefore obtain [the novel]… in the usual way with the
rest of the public” (1). She did not need good reviews; the masses loved
188 Colleen Morrissey
her: “[E]ven if I had written trash,” she wrote to her first publisher, “the
public would still demand it…” (Letters, 14 March 1889). It was the over-
whelmingly male literary press who scorned her, and she declared that
she felt it “impossible for a woman-writer ever to receive justice from
men-critics…” (Letters, 15 November 1890). Her Satan, therefore, ar-
ticulates not only the pain of the rejected genius but also the pain of
gender discrimination. Corelli thereby refashions the ultimate rebel who
has been oft-­appropriated by male writers as the symbol of their genius
and rehabilitates him to articulate her own perverse position. Speaking
through Satan, the critic of Christianity par excellence, not only grants
Corelli the support of a prestigious literary tradition built to accommo-
date heterodoxy but also lends her the rhetorical leeway and ambiguity
unique to the Father of Lies.5 Furthermore, her rewrite of the Satan origin
myth highlights a truly existential cynicism about God’s universal order.
In essence, understanding Corelli’s refashioning of the War in Heaven,
in which Satan leads an angelic rebellion against God, allows us to under-
stand the position of a popular woman writer at the fin de siècle whose
life and views were not represented by New Woman fiction. Corelli lam-
pooned fellow women writers, opposed women’s suffrage for most of
her life, and often endorsed traditional femininity in her fiction by cele-
brating classically beautiful, modest, and serene women. Unraveling her
complicated politics and morality, however, allows us to understand how
a woman author disowned by the avant-garde saw her truly exemplary
situation, which, in turn, reveals previously unexplored truths about
woman creators at this point in history. Corelli’s revision of the predom-
inantly male literary tradition of the Romantic Satan sheds light on the
patriarchal bent of religious and literary discourse and complicates our
conceptions of the temptation story and, indeed, the cornerstone narra-
tives of Christianity itself. In the male guise of the sympathetic Satan,
Corelli can claim the glory of the wronged martyr and express the wealth
of anger and pain roiling underneath the closely controlled public pres-
ence of a female author isolated from and by her peers. This cover also
allows a practicing Christian who professed belief in God’s justice and
mercy to express deep pessimism about the redemptive potential of an
unjust universe. Finally, Corelli’s revision of the Romantic Satan enables
her, an individual with a deep sense of moral purpose, to speak what
she believed to be a divinely compelled truth to an artistic and religious
community who found her beliefs heterodox and far-fetched. Uncovering
Corelli’s philosophy reveals the existential hopes and fears of an era.

Angel or Devil: The Authorial Constraints

of Mavis Clare
In pinpointing Mavis Clare as Marie Corelli’s “idealized self-
dramatization,” critics like Federico identify Clare as a kind of
Romantic outcast genius, but Clare’s position as a female novelist
 Rewriting the Romantic Satan 189
compromises the very issues Corelli wants to tackle (Federico 83).
In the story, Clare bears obvious similarities to Corelli herself: Clare
is a best-seller who infuriates the literary establishment, including
would-be author and protagonist Geoffrey Tempest, because her
morally upright books continue to sell wildly despite the disparage-
ment of the literary establishment. Mavis Clare even shares her au-
thor’s initials. Tempest’s unknowing entrance into a pact with Satan
(disguised as foreign prince Lucio Rimânez) provides him money to
bribe publishers and reviewers who then “boom” or shower his book
with praise in order to drive up sales (Sorrows 11). Initially trium-
phant, Tempest soon finds himself dissatisfied with the fleeting fame
brought on by his tepid book and all the more envious of Clare’s
innocent popularity, which is attributed to her “tenaciousness” and
emotional honesty as well as to her avowed mission of public uplift
(Sorrows 73). According to critics like Christiane Gannon and Jill
­G alvan, Corelli situates her female novelist as a Christ-like “minis-
trant” who, through her writing, communicates God’s divine love
(Gannon 378; Galvan, “Christians, Infidels…” 91).
The similarities between Mavis Clare and the real M.C. who wrote her
are indeed suggestive. Like the fictional publisher who identifies M ­ avis
Clare’s appeal, critics have long identified Corelli’s stylistic hallmark as
her supposed “utter sincerity” (Federico 34). Rita Felski calls Corelli’s
work “antithetical to the ironical and critical stance of the avant-garde”
(118). In this view, any aberration from a bourgeois ethic in Corelli’s
works is chalked up to a loss of control on Corelli’s part—her texts strain
against her intentions as they undermine and elude her. R. ­Brandon
Kershner, for instance, actually finds kinship between Corelli and James
Joyce in that they both construct larger-than-life self-portraits in their
novels, but he dismisses many of Corelli’s ­“technical ironies” as the
“blundering” results of “incompetence” (56, 54). The supposed trans-
parency of Mavis Clare as Marie Corelli’s avatar, then, is explained as
the product of Corelli’s inability to achieve enough critical “distance”
from her “megalomania” in the way that Joyce does with Stephen
­Dedalus (Kershner 57). Corelli herself, however, “angrily denied ‘being
so conceited as to draw [her] own picture in that ideal conception’” of
Mavis Clare (Federico 35). The tendency to read Corelli as helplessly
sincere, which is exemplified in this interpretation of Clare-as-Corelli,
springs from a limited interpretation of Corelli’s apparently paradoxical
politics—and indeed, her intelligence.
These crossed signals in Corelli’s works demonstrate the way that
“‘women’s language’ becomes a calculated response to alienation and
censorship,” threats that Corelli uniquely experienced as an interna-
tional star who outsold more canonical writers (Lanser 11). Corelli re-
peatedly declared herself, in all her writing, a fervent Christian, but her
antiestablishment critique ran just as strong as her conservative streak,
and men were often the subject of her righteous indignation. Her later
190 Colleen Morrissey
essays such as “Coward Adam” (1905) confront head-on what she saw
as the sins of men (Free Opinions 182–183).6 In this essay and its com-
panion piece “Accursëd Eve,” she insists that the idea that “Eve and
all the descendants of her sex should be compelled to suffer centuries
of torture” because the first woman was “beguiled” by Satan and then
blamed “by Coward Adam” is “manifestly cruel and arbitrary” (Free
Opinions 171). This is essentially an anti-patriarchal interpretation of
original sin, and Corelli offers it only on her own authority. She goes
on to assert that Genesis itself is a misogynistic work: “Man has taken
the full license allowed him by the old Genesis story (which, by the way,
was evidently invented by man himself for his own convenience)” (Free
Opinions 171). In “The ‘Strong’ Book of the Ishbosheth,” she hurls sim-
ilar charges at the male literary establishment, accusing them of promot-
ing novels “in which women are depicted at the lowest kickable depth of
drabism to which men can drag them, while men are represented as the
suffering victims of their wickedness” (Free Opinions 275).7
At the same time, Corelli spent her entire career in a Sisyphean quest
for acceptance by this same establishment, leading her to adopt certain
principles apparently antithetical to progressive feminism.8 Her strategic
preoccupation with appearing young and beautiful, combined with her
incensed insistence on being taken seriously as an artist who wrote, she
believed, with “masculine power,” brought forth repeated torrents of
laughter in the press (Letters, 15 November 1890). She was considered
too feminine and too masculine, simultaneously—too feminine in her
wild effusions of sentiment and too masculine in her dark, often violent
and sexually coded subject matter, both tendencies which made her re-
pulsive to the literati. Oscar Wilde, for instance, admired her early nov-
els but would later join in the pastime of “slashing” Corelli, commenting
in 1898, “Half of the success of Marie Corelli is due to the no doubt
unfounded rumour that she is a woman” (qtd. in Federico 127). Radical
women writers were ostracized for their convictions that rejected tradi-
tional marriage and motherhood, but Corelli was ostracized despite and
because of her conformity to certain “feminine” standards.
As the direct representative of female authorship in the novel, a profes-
sion Corelli felt incumbent to defend, Mavis Clare is therefore bound to
the same image of “feminine” sweetness as her creator. Tellingly, Clare’s
studio is a shrine to male genius; its walls are decorated with bas-reliefs
of Keats, Shakespeare, Byron, and Shelley, and she quotes their own re-
sentment of critics (Sorrows 174).9 Though she wraps herself in the ethos
of these recognized male geniuses, she does not enjoy the protection to
which their gender entitled them. Lest Clare fulfill the stereotype of em-
bittered spinsterhood, she must not only turn the other cheek but give
the impression of being above such pettiness: “‘You really don’t suppose
I was hurt by your critique, do you? Dear me, no! Nothing of that kind
ever affronts me,—I am far too busy to waste any thought on reviews
 Rewriting the Romantic Satan 191
or reviewers’” (Sorrows 165). She even loves her enemies: “‘I am not a
press favorite—and I never get good reviews,—but—’ and she laughed
again—‘I like my reviewers all the same!’”(Sorrows 167).
Mavis Clare’s violent streak, which others have found puzzlingly in-
congruous with her otherwise angelic role in the novel, betrays the in-
ability of the female author character to contain both rage and despair
in a way that doesn’t double back. Belying her insistence that bad press
doesn’t bother her, Clare names a coterie of ridiculous birds after various
periodicals and magazines who have “slashed” her and makes a ritual of
giving her bad reviews to her dogs to savage. With such behavior, Clare
seems to justify the literati’s picture of her as an angry “blue-stocking”
(Sorrows 162). It’s a trap, and Corelli recognized it. The fact that so
many contemporary (and even twenty-first century) critics still thought
that she fell into it shows just how deadly the trap is.

Satanic Affordances: The Gendered Genealogy of the

Romantic Satan
Clare’s deviations from feminine respectability demonstrate the pitfalls of
using female characters as vessels for the anger of female authors, calling
to mind the dissociation of the paradigmatic “madwoman in the attic.”10
For male writers after Milton, the character of Satan offered such a ves-
sel, embodying their rage against the establishment. Nineteenth-­century
women writers frequently evoke the demonic as a trope of the Gothic
tradition, but the use of Satan himself in the way the male ­Romantics
envisioned him as a magnificent iconoclast is rare.11 In Gothic literature
written by women, the demonic is often harmful at worst and ambiguous
at best, usually conflated either with masculine violence or the frighten-
ing specter of feminine madness.12 While the Brontës portray arguably
“demonic” women in their novels, these characters’ aberrations are of-
ten punished rather than celebrated in the way the Romantics celebrated
­Satan’s rock-star rebellion. The demonic interpositions of B­ ertha ­Mason
in Jane Eyre (1847) and Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights
(1846) are purged by novel’s end. Christina Rossetti’s poems similarly
“imagined many scenarios in which demon lovers promise, at least ini-
tially, to save women from sterile lives,” only to defile or destroy them
(Waldman 5). In The Sorrows of Satan itself, another demonic woman,
Sybil, is dragged down to hell as punishment for being a materialist,
idolater, and would-be adulteress. Per Faxneld has recently traced how
some radical feminists in the late nineteenth century “performed ­counter-
readings of Christian misogynist traditions” in which “Lucifer became
reconceptualized as a feminist liberator of ­womankind[,]… an ally
in the struggle against a patriarchy supported by God the Father and his
male priests” (2). Even these rebellious reimaginings position Satan “as
woman’s helper” rather than her avatar (Faxneld 8).
192 Colleen Morrissey
The dearth of Satanic alter egos for female writers can easily be ex-
plained by the way that the “historically dominant gender” has claimed
Satan as a masculine literary type (Fernie 143). Like the masculine
­Godhead, the Devil has been cast as essentially male, and so most iter-
ations of the “feminine demon” in literature such as the femme fatale,
the witch, and the succubus tend either to personify women’s dissociated
fears or act as vessels for masculine anxieties about female sexual power
(Andriano 18).13 And the “feminine demon” is no Satan. The witch,
for instance, only borrows the Devil’s power. The male “demonic pro-
tagonist falls prey to the Devil, but not before in an important sense he
becomes the Devil. Faustus tastes the bliss and the sorrows of Satan for
himself” (Fernie 143). The female demon never becomes Satan, never
gains the same kind of superior, self-sufficient power; usually, she is sub-
ordinate to Satan, if not acting under his instruction then drawing her
abilities from him.
Textual authority, as Susan Lanser points out, is granted through
rhetorical practices related to white maleness. These practices can be
appropriated by others, and so adopting a male character or narrator
can provide female authors the credibility denied to them by their so-
cial realities (Lanser 6–7). Using the voice of a male character who is
also imbued with supernatural power and a tradition of stylishly buck-
ing authority should prove even more empowering. Yet, curiously,
very few nineteenth-century women writers embraced Satan himself
as a figure of identification, even among the revolutionary Romantics
(Craciun ­702–703). In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary
­Wollstonecraft asserts that to deny women’s darker impulses is to deny
them souls; “innocence” is “but a civil term for weakness” (50). Mil-
ton’s Eve, the epitome of men’s view of ideal womanhood, is “formed
for softness and sweet attractive grace” but is therefore, in Wollstone-
craft’s mind, bestial and soulless (50). The language of perfect tranquil-
ity masks a desire for women to become “gentle, domestic brutes,” mute
and unintellectual (50). If this is Heaven, Wollstonecraft wants none of
it. She turns away from the stifling domesticity of Eden and turns to the
Satanic: ­“Instead of envying the lovely pair [Adam and Eve], I have with
conscious dignity, or Satanic pride, turned to hell for sublimer objects”
(57). If Heaven is so suffocating for women, then the “outcast” is by con-
trast “the grandest of all human sights,” and Hell is the place for free-
dom and self-­determination. “Milton’s pleasing picture of paradisaical
[sic] happiness” keeps women in a state of immature obedience which,
in a self-fulfilling prophecy, turns them into the very petulant children
which men claim must be ruled (57). Wollstonecraft prefers the explicitly
­Satanic state of “solitary recess,” where, “rising superior to passion and
discontent” a woman can become a true, complex adult (57).
Wollstonecraft offers the first revision of Satan that specifically re-
flects female experience, but her revision is predicated upon a deliberate
 Rewriting the Romantic Satan 193
“turn” away from the world, “rising superior to passion and discontent”
(57). Looking forward nearly a hundred years, Marie Corelli’s Satan
is also an isolated outcast, a misunderstood avatar for female genius
rejected and derided by male peers.14 Unlike Wollstonecraft’s, however,
Corelli’s Satan does not choose isolation as a repudiation of a philistine
Heaven, does not rise “superior to passion and discontent,” and does
not find Hell sublime. For Corelli’s Satan, the true Hell is on Earth, the
space to which man’s sin has banished him. There is no defiant deter-
mination to rule in Hell rather than serve in Heaven; in fact, in a major
revision of the Miltonic tradition, Corelli’s Satan is perpetually trying
to get back into Heaven’s good graces. Ergo, Corelli’s Satan embodies
the isolated suffering of a commercially successful, non-radical female
artist under the patriarchy. Wollstonecraft’s Satan is seen as “feminist”
because of his radical rejection of the Father that rejected him (Craciun
702–703). Her Satan is something of a feminist separatist, characteriz-
ing Hell as the realm outside of the patriarchy. But Corelli’s Satan is a
despairing Satan who lingers in the sorrow of rejection at the same time
as he shakes his fist because there actually is no other world, outside of
the Father’s purview, where he can rule. In this way, Corelli’s Satan is a
pragmatic pessimist; her Satanic vision is an enraged, estranged cry from
a wronged innocent who no longer dares to hope for justice and yet who
longs to be embraced by his persecutors.15
The parallels with Corelli’s own position are clear. As a morally con-
servative Christian woman, Corelli neither rejects and detaches from
the world like a Byronic Satan, nor does she embrace a radical reeval-
uation of the sublimity of the outcast’s status like a Wollstonecraftian
Satan. The mythological Satan, however, provides other affordances as
a self-representation for a female author. For one, his traditional male-
ness, as Lanser has shown, imbues him with a certain worldly author-
ity and protects him from the gendered criticisms of a female character
like Mavis Clare. In addition, this specific type’s status as the ultimate,
powerful outcast provides automatic gravity and a ready-built basis for
heterodoxy. Only through Lucio’s mouth can Corelli spout invective,
drastically revised religious doctrine, and inhabit a position of moral
authority without being accused of holier-than-thou snobbery, profes-
sional jealousy, or personal self-consciousness.
Lucio enables Corelli’s critique not only because he is male but be-
cause he is Satan. The attributes of the Satanic mythos double down on
the “double voice” that enables female writers to “call into question the
very authority they endorse or, conversely, endorse the authority they
seem to be questioning” (Lanser 8). As Fred Parker points out in his
analysis of Byron’s Biblical drama Cain (1821), the Satanic voice results
in an inevitable paradox. Even when the Devil, to all indications, seems
to express his author’s own beliefs, we can never be certain that ­Satan
means what he says—because, after all, he is Satan (16). If Corelli’s
194 Colleen Morrissey
Satan espouses heterodoxy, then the author cannot be blamed, since it
is essentially Satan’s job to be heterodox. Even when Lucio seems quite
sincere (which he often does) in his scathing analyses of masculine es-
tablishments like publishing and the Church, Corelli nonetheless gains
plausible deniability, allowing her to inhabit the position of authoritative
spiritual leader while simultaneously criticizing patriarchal Christianity
itself. Corelli’s heterodoxy, however, was not the revolutionary one of
the Romantics. Rather, her worldview betrays a disgusted cynicism re-
garding the worth of mankind (particularly the men of mankind) and an
existential doubt about the justness of God’s universal order—an order
which seems all too much to resemble a Faustian pact in which an unfair
bargain struck between an ignorant humanity and a supernatural being
leads to humanity’s damnation.

The Gospel According to Lucifer

Unlike Milton’s Lucifer and his other literary descendants, Prince Lucio
has a serious conflict of interest: he must embody the dual but opposed
roles of tempter and intercessor. In other words, it is Lucio’s task to
tempt and thereby damn souls, but his tragedy is that only his failure
in that task will redeem him. Corelli’s mythology begins orthodoxly:
“Lucifer, Son of the Morning,” is an archangel, “supreme, at the right
hand of the Deity itself,” but when Lucifer sees that the Father’s new
“slight poor creature” Man is endowed with the ability to rise into “the
Angelic likeness,” he protests that the creature is unfit for such an honor
(Sorrows 46).16 Lucifer declares that he will destroy these creatures who
do not deserve to share with him “‘the splendours of Thy Wisdom,—the
glory of Thy love!’” (46). But God’s subsequent punishment, enforcing
an implicit law of complete honesty in the divine presence, takes us into
the realm of heterodoxy. God declares, “‘[F]ull well dost thou know
that never can an idle or wasted word be spoken before Me … therefore
what thou sayest, thou must needs do! Fall, proud Spirit from thy high
estate!’” (46–47). God casts Lucifer and his companions out of Heaven
before Lucifer even has the chance to lead an angelic civil war. God’s
preemptive strike here bears remarkable similarity to a Faustian pact,
wherein God creates an everlasting Hell for Lucifer, in which he must
repeatedly recommit the very sin that damned him:

Fall, proud Spirit… and return no more till Man himself redeem
thee! Each human soul that yields unto thy tempting shall be a new
barrier set between thee and heaven; each one that of its own choice
doth repel and overcome thee, shall lift thee nearer to thy lost home!
When the world rejects thee, I will pardon and again receive thee,—
but not till then.
(47)
 Rewriting the Romantic Satan 195
Despite what God says about humankind redeeming Satan, Satan’s
eternal self-wounding culminates, optimally, in proof of humanity’s re-
demption. Lucio must do his utmost to tempt souls, but God is willing
to give him a reward for services rendered in assuming humanity’s pain:
one hour in heaven for every soul he fails to damn (344). Ironically,
Christ’s one-time sacrifice in this schema merely underwrites the con-
tinual grace Satan himself must reaffirm.17 Rather than reenter Heaven
through a one-time Passion, Lucio must paradoxically work against his
reunification with God in order to reunite with God. No wonder Lucio
declares, “easy was the torture of Sisyphus compared with the torture
of Satan!” (320).
This divinely ordained state of perpetual sacrificial torment illustrates
how Corelli saw her place as a Christian writer—a moral authority
compelled to speak truth to the sinful, only to find every new attempt
met with rejection from the gatekeepers of culture. The conditions of
Lucio’s rather sadistic bargain with God suggest a world so fallen that
anyone who would attempt to save or even improve it faces nothing but
self-­sacrifice. In the world of The Sorrows of Satan, humankind is ir-
revocably flawed, its transcendence near-impossible. “‘Everything in
the Universe is perfect …’” Lucio says, “‘except that curious piece of
work—Man. Have you never thought out any reason why he should be the
one flaw,—the one incomplete creature in a matchless Creation?’” (61).
Humanity is the blight upon the universe, the source of Satan’s suffer-
ing. For the ­Romantics, the answer to this mass malevolence would
have been separatism, reclusion within a coterie of the like-minded, as
­M ilton’s Satan enacts in Hell with his demons. But for Corelli—at least
at this point in her career—there is nothing to be gained by embracing
isolation, and, indeed, to do so would be to defy God’s order.18 In her
fiery early years as an author, she wrote to her publisher, “[T]o alter my
work is to alter myself—to become a servant to the public taste, instead
of the expressor [sic] of instinctive thought;—I cannot do this—neither
for fame nor money” (Letters, 13 March 1889). Furthermore, she in-
sisted, “[M]y work is part of my soul …” (Letters, 12 June 1887).19 As
someone who saw moral critique and self-expression as the highest call-
ing of a writer—indeed, the moral mandate of a writer—Corelli found
she had no choice but to evangelize.
Yet even at this zenith of her career, Corelli found that evangelization
bore only the smallest possibility of reward, and the reward itself was
predicated on pain. Like the traditional martyr whose compensation for
torture is the ecstasy of sharing in Christ’s Passion, Lucio’s torments have
the curious effect of making him all the more beautiful. Many scenes in
the novel luxuriate in Lucio’s beautiful pain, evoking the iconography
of saints and martyrs. When Tempest’s wife offers herself sexually to
­Lucio, Lucio cries out, “‘—and yet again I hear the barring of the gates of
Paradise! O infinite torture! O wicked souls of men and women! … and
196 Colleen Morrissey
will ye make my sorrows eternal!’” (264). Moonlight streams through a
picture window portraying St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and
illuminates “a great and terrible anguish in his [Lucio’s] eyes” (264).
Robert Mills has argued that, “In the realm of the martyr, suffering—
whether ‘mental’ or ‘physical’—is transformed through torture into a
palpable sign of God’s present existence” (157). Indeed, the potent eroti-
cism of martyrdom iconography, with its proliferation of stripped-down
or even nude youths captured mid-writhe, renders torment as a desired
spectacle. Corelli’s descriptions of Lucio employ all the beatification of
saintly suffering, and in this way she creates a similarly potent yet sanc-
tified object of desire whose desirability is accentuated by and even pred-
icated on his pain.
In his only moment of reprieve, when Tempest finally rejects Lucio’s
mastery and thus affords Lucio an hour in heaven, Lucio’s pain remains
the standard of his glory:

[Lucio], supreme, majestic, wonderful, towered high above them all,

a very king of splendor … his eyes, twin stars, ablaze with such great
rapture as seemed half agony! […] Once more … yet once … the
Angel-visage bent its warning looks on me, … I saw the anguished
smile, … the great eyes burning with immortal sorrows!
(344–345, emphasis added)20

Here, Lucio’s disempowerment—that is, his surrender to God’s

­punishment—enables his return to his original angelic position of power
as “king of splendor.” In this way, Corelli draws upon the hagiographic
tradition to create an avatar who is not simply an outcast genius; she cre-
ates an avatar whose pain and vitiation equal ecstasy and beauty rather
than abjection.

The Satanic Self in an “Un-Beautiful” Universe

Corelli’s suffering Satan is, as we have seen, a unique composite of saint,
martyr, and demon. The implications of this hybridity thus distinguish
Corelli from the Satanic literary tradition in the following ways. First,
for the Romantics (including Wollstonecraft), a fantasy of supernatural
empowerment, that is, ruling in Hell, compensated for societal rejection.
For Corelli, a woman who considered it her calling to preach even to deaf
ears, this was not an option. Her Satan is disempowered, not when it
comes to his sway over humankind but when it comes to his subordina-
tion to God’s will. Second, Lucio does not espouse a radical detachment.
No, he feels, and mostly, he feels pain. Satan’s supernatural capabilities
remain—he changes shape, controls reincarnated souls, and conjures
ghostly spectacles—but unlike Byron’s or even Wollstonecraft’s Satan,
he is also a martyr. Ultimately, Corelli takes over this masculine power
 Rewriting the Romantic Satan 197
fantasy embodied in Satan, alters the figure’s traditional backstory to take
away his Romantic detachment, and instead makes him into a sacrificial
lamb to show that martyrdom (whether at the hands of pagans or the
press) does not mean defeat but rather glory, even desirability. The pro-
fessional pillorying Corelli endures, by proxy, only beautifies and glorifies
her. A moral rewriting of disempowerment and rejection, a rehabilitation
of pain, is in itself a spectacular literary ­gesture from a female author.
This terrible but clear-eyed Satan, then, is the figure Corelli chooses
both to personify her own suffering and to voice her biting insight into
human nature. Despite the clear pessimism of this stance, Corelli’s so-
called “utopianism” has remained a significant through-line permeating
scholarship on her life and works. Felski finds Corelli exemplary of the
“utopian,” transcendental, and “idealist” “popular sublime” (118). 21 In-
deed, many of Corelli’s novels (like Mavis Clare’s) contain extra-bodily
transports of religious ecstasy and provide uplifting tales of the soul’s im-
mortality, of good triumphing over evil. However, if Corelli is “utopian,”
it is not in the sense that she weaves “escapist fantas[ies]” (Felski 120).
Corelli is a pessimistic Christian with more fire and brimstone in her than
good news. Her Earth is a scorched one, “converted into a bloody theatre
of discord and robbery” (Free Opinions 123). ­Society is hypocritical and
unproductive. Her picture of the Christian establishment is apocalyptic,
condemning modern churches for creating a “pagan” population through
their “Romanized” empty ritual (Free Opinions 32). Corelli sees wrong-
doing wherever she looks, claiming that if England were really a Chris-
tian society, neither the rampant factory labor abuse nor the disastrous
Boer War would have happened (Free Opinions 54). And indeed, much of
this injustice is suffered by women at the hands of men, a pattern which
was instigated by Adam—or at least by the writer of Genesis.
Lucio, then, carrying both traditional Satanic characteristics and spe-
cific Corellian attributes, articulates the limitations the patriarchy places
upon Corelli’s reformatory zeal and creative talent. Her oeuvre is full of
elect, misunderstood heroes and heroines who alone can see the sinful-
ness of their fellow creatures yet who feel that they cannot make a dent
in their brethren’s hard-headedness. True artistry is no longer possible.
“England’s last great poet,” Corelli insists, “was Tennyson,—since his
death we have had no other” (Free Opinions 98). Indeed,

The beautiful and poetic ideals that made such work possible are,
if not quite dead, slowly dying, under the influence of the ‘blight’
which infects the social atmosphere… And those who see it slowly
darkening…will surely pray for a Storm!
(Free Opinions 99)

Martin Hipsky claims that “the grace of Mavis Clare restores meaning
and spiritual order [at the end of The Sorrows of Satan]. In this manner,
198 Colleen Morrissey
Corelli has generated an impossibly virtuous heroine and has offered a
fantasy resolution to the novel’s governing antinomy” (86). When we
locate Lucio as Corelli’s real avatar, we do see the paradox of existence
but we do not see its redemption. Mavis Clare does not redeem the fallen
world portrayed in the novel. No one does. As Lucio says, “Eternal jus-
tice has spoken,—Humanity, through the teaching of God made human,
must work out its own redemption,—and Mine!” (339).
But even dystopian visions are, to some extent, utopias. The upshot of
Corelli’s miserable Satan is the fantastical alternative he offers to mate-
rial and social limitations—not an escape from the pain brought by those
limitations but a radical embrace of their spiritual rewards. The damna-
tion of a Faustian pact becomes the salvation of martyrdom. Through-
out her career, Marie Corelli lamented being willfully misunderstood
by her critics and even her once-closest friends, who judged her writing
“twaddle” and her personality a sham upon youth and beauty. Any time
Corelli wrote about herself, directly or indirectly, her message was: I am
not what they say I am. Satan’s modus operandi is to be contrary, to be
not what he seems. Only the demonic allows this disavowal of the self
while maintaining a powerful ego, and only Satan—not the witch, the
succubus, or the femme fatale—can transcend the facts of biological sex
which turn to fetters within a patriarchal world. Satan offers his creator
a screen for unspeakable cynicism and anger at what Corelli elsewhere
calls an unjust, “un-beautiful” universe (Open ­Confessions 130). The
­demonic itself is the domain in which such contraventions can be ex-
plored. As Dyan Elliott puts it, “The distance between the pure ideal
and the inevitability of an impure reality—the pure being constantly
impugned by transgressions in both deed and thought—was the space
within which the symbolic terrain of the demonic world was consti-
tuted” (2). Corelli wrote, “The fact is, the times are evil—and there
is an instinctive sense in everyone that something is wrong, something
that will have to be set right, probably at a frightful cost of trouble and
sorrow” (Letters, 27 March 1889). The disavowal of the evil materiality
of this world in favor of the glory of spiritual agonies and ecstasies is
how Corelli constitutes her fantastical utopia/dystopia. All of Corelli’s
writings wrap themselves in the armor of the angelic but possess a de-
monic heart, and the space between what is and what should be is where
Corelli’s Satan is born. He can hold the contradiction that she, to her
frustration, could not hold in her own life. More fundamentally than
I am not what I seem, Corelli was saying: I am not what I am.

Notes
1 See, for instance, Felski and Cvetovich.
2 Spiritualism and Theosophy both emerged in the “mystical revival” of the lat-
ter half of the nineteenth century. While spiritualism is a broader term refer-
ring to an occult practice based on communication with the dead, Theosophy
 Rewriting the Romantic Satan 199
here refers to the specific esoteric philosophy of the Theosophical Society,
founded in part by Helena Blavatsky (or “Madame Blavatsky”) in the 1870s
(Owen 39). Members of the Theosophical Society professed themselves to
be nonsectarian seekers of truth, particularly through studying ancient and/
or Eastern religions (Owens 39–41). As Alex Owen explains, “All occultists
argued that science had not yet plumbed the mysteries of natural law,” but
Theosophists espoused a “far more sophisticated” belief system than spiritu-
alists, professing adherence to an entire, unique cosmological order (39).
3 Parenthetical references to this text will hereafter be referred to as “
­ Sorrows.”
Corelli would profess many different heterodox views in her books, which a
number of readers treated like theology. For instance, her treatise on “The
Electric Principle of Christianity,” in the text of A Romance of Two Worlds,
which, in her own words, “attach[es] scientific possibility to the perfect doc-
trines of the New Testament” won Corelli a not insignificant number of
religious followers (Letters [15 November 1886]). She included several pieces
of fan mail in an appendix to the second edition of Romance, whose writers
profess to have been converted to the belief system Corelli lays out therein.
One letter lauds Corelli for transcending the spiritualist and Theosophical
dogmas though “combining… occult knowledge with… firm belief in the
Christian religion” (312). Another letter even claims to have originated from
a clergyman in the Church of England who had been on the brink of suicide.
Having succumbed to “modern scientific atheism,” the clergyman attests he
was “saved” by the doctrine of A Romance of Two Worlds (314).
4 Corelli would later soften toward Ouida after corresponding with her, and
they shared their own complaints about a young upstart named Rudyard
Kipling, who was getting a lot of attention despite his writing being “very
twaddly” (Letters [23 May 1890]).
5 In John 8:44, Jesus calls Satan “a murderer from the beginning, who does
not stand in the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks
according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (New
Oxford Annotated Bible). Jesus proclaims that Satan was the originator or
“father” of lies, and therefore lying is part of Satan’s nature.
6 Parenthetical references to this text will hereafter be referred to as “Free
Opinions.”
7 For a recent, enlightening analysis of “Ishbosheth” and Corelli’s condemna-
tion of the literati’s association of artistic merit with realism and masculin-
ity, see Galvan, “Corelli’s Caliban in a Glass: Realism, Antirealism, and The
Sorrows of Satan.”
8 Tamara S. Wagner writes that “women writers not directly invested in—or
averse to—specific agendas have… additionally been marginalized for disprov-
ing an evolutionary model of progressive female self-­representation” (6). ­Felski’s
persuasive explanation for scholars’ neglect of Corelli is that C ­ orelli’s work
“cannot be easily recuperated into a critical apparatus which simply equates the
popular with the radical” (141). For another challenge to the idea that popular
literature must be subversive to be worthy of study, see also Cvetovich.
9 Clare also reverences another significant male writer: “‘Milton’s conception
of Satan is the finest… A mighty Angel fallen!—one cannot but be sorry for
such a fall, if the legend were true!’” (174)
10 I refer here to Gilbert and Gubar’s essential 1979 book The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
11 Adriana Craciun has pointed out that, “beyond the Satanic masculinity
in the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë,
scholars have largely neglected women’s writings on Satan” (700). However,
most female Romantics like Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith tended
200 Colleen Morrissey
to feminize the Satanic story, recounting the demise of “the Fallen Pleiad”
rather than embracing identification with Satan himself. In this scenario
woman’s martyrdom is a tragic fate rather than a darkly glorious rebirth like
Satan’s self-fashioning after his fall (707).
12 Kristen Guest claims that Corelli separates the male and female characters
of Sorrows into the Gothic and the tragic, respectively: “Corelli’s female
protagonists offer a counterpoint to the Gothic horrors of male egotism in
the female qualities of love, faith, and self-sacrifice. She therefore aligns fe-
male experience with the impulse toward transcendence evident in Romantic
conceptions of tragedy” (152).
13 Some feminists have located the “demonic feminine” as a primeval, pre-
historic, pre-Judeo-Christian feminine entity. See, for instance Paglia and
­Auerbach. Per Faxneld’s recent Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator
of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2017) provides a fascinating
look at the history of “Satanic feminism,” that is, the radical reimagining of
Satan as a feminist figure.
14 This direct link with Wollstonecraft shows us that kinship between women
writers is not reliant upon subversion, not even upon explicitly feminist
politics.
15 “I feel it a trifle hard,” Corelli wrote, “that when others who do less good
work can get high praise, that I should not also win a trifle of honest recog-
nition” (Letters [15 November 1890]).
16 As Biblical scholars have pointed out, the name “Lucifer,” meaning “light-
bearer” is first used scripturally in Jerome’s Latin Bible and was not, in
­Hebraic tradition, meant to refer to “the Devil” (Forsyth 36). The Christian
Lucifer/Satan is an amalgamation of several different biblical and mythical
figures. For more on the origins of the Satan mythos, see Parker.
17 Elaine M. Hartnell touches upon this, but reaches a different conclusion:
“For, though Christ cannot save us by faith, Satan is on hand to hinder our
efforts should we give him the slightest encouragement” (287).
18 In a later novel, Corelli would get as close as she ever came to depicting
a more Faustian female demonic protagonist in the titular character of
The Young Diana (1918). In this novel, supernaturally ageless Diana uses
her powers of attraction to torment the society that once rejected her, but
as time goes on, Diana becomes more and more divorced from humanity
and secludes herself in an unknown location for the rest of time—a truly
dark ending for a tale of female revenge and empowerment. Written only
six years before Corelli’s death, The Young Diana offers the kind of weary
withdrawal the author would have rejected twenty years before, when The
Sorrows of Satan found her at the height of fame and influence.
19 For more on Corelli’s refusal to separate her life from her art, see Federico.
20 The ellipses in this passage, except when marked by brackets (like so: […])
are original to Corelli’s novel.
21 This line of thinking is based, of course, on Andreas Huyssen’s argument
about the inscription of a threatening femininity onto mass culture at the
turn of the century.

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13 Beauty is the Beast
Shapeshifting, Suffrage,
and Sexuality in Clemence
Housman’s The Were-wolf and
Aino Kallas’s The Wolf’s Bride
Lizzie Harris McCormick

Andrew Lang published The Blue Fairy Book, the first of his widely
read and influential series of collected folk and fairy tales, on the cusp of
the 1890s. This volume included many now-canonical stories in which
pure-hearted adolescent girls faced off against fearsome beasts, includ-
ing “Goldilocks,” “Red Riding Hood,” and “Beauty and the Beast.”
Scholars have frequently understood such tales as meditations on the
blossoming of female sexuality counterpoised against the domestica-
tion of male carnality.1 The coming-of-age beauty must warm up to the
“beast” of male lust who is then, through the alchemy of her true love,
transformed into a romantic and chivalrous prince. Henri Rousseau’s
1909 painting “Beauty and the Beast” clearly reveals that this subtext
was hardly lost on artists and thinkers of the age (Figure 13.1).
Lang’s subsequent successes with his more-than-annual publications
of new collected tales fed into (and was fueled by) not only larger trends

Figure 13.1 H
 enri Rousseau, “Beauty and the Beast” (1909).
204 Lizzie Harris McCormick
in children’s literature and the era’s revived interest in folktales, but also
the fin de siècle’s interest in the specifically sexual aspects of its gender
politics. In allegorical formulations emerging out of all fronts from 1880
through World War I, the popular image of “the beast” was specifically
understood to mean the kind of “selfish, egotistic, sexual lustfulness”
considered “closer to the surface in men” and, perhaps, to exist in more
dangerous proportions and manifestations therein (Bland xiii). Women
and girls were ubiquitously placed in metaphorical opposition to the
beast as taming, morally righteous figures, representing “higher” spir-
itual selves who could overpower and subdue even the fiercest creature
via their gender-specific innate virtue. This archetypal pattern wherein
pure womanhood (the girl-woman) combatted violent and excessive
male lust (always a beast) was used by early feminists and suffragettes
in their morality campaigns against a range of ills from spousal rape
to child molestation to the spread of venereal diseases via promiscuous
husbands.
Though this metaphor had its uses, it paradoxically engendered and
enabled the double standard that suffragettes resented. If their claims
to the ethical high ground in public debates over rights for women de-
pended on an assertion of innate physiological and moral difference,
leveraging such a paradigm again and again could support the core tenet
of the sexism they fought: namely, that women were fundamentally dif-
ferent than men and, therefore, less fit to operate in some areas of life
than others. This schematic’s fault lines—namely, that its gendered logic
was inadequate to defeat gendered oppression—and its definitional par-
adoxes and ambiguities had many effects; no doubt they informed both
the actual and the perceived sexual experiences and identities of genera-
tions of women and their partners.
This would lead one to hypothesize that figures of the werewolf, the
ur-beasts of the supernatural canon, produced under this worldview,
would then exist in a hyper-gendered state. After all, ontologically and
metaphorically, werewolves stand apart from other types of fantastic
beings because they are so thoroughly natural. Their messy, corporeal
identity marks them as always-already atavistic and layers onto even their
human side intense animal appetites. Their supernatural status must
always coexist with an exaggeratedly natural one, often in constantly
shifting and destabilized ratios. Their fundamental beastliness connects
intimately to late nineteenth-century discourses of evolution and later to
early twentieth-century psychoanalytic ideas about the id, human sex-
uality, and the death drive. Their feral proficiency is rarely counterbal-
anced, as is the vampire’s, by a sense of evolved aesthetic or intellectual
progress over an enhanced lifespan, or by the ghost’s disembodiment.
Bernhardt-House contrasts the vampire’s state of “transcendental per-
manence” to the werewolf’s “permanent transformation” (165). The
­super-biological drumbeat of the beast’s double nature amplifies rather
 Beauty is the Beast 205
than escapes its biology. By all rights, then, the werewolf would be natu-
rally and consistently aligned with narratives of “beastly” male sexuality.
Yet this is not the case.
This chapter addresses a complex phenomenon in feminist-authored
fantastic literature: what happens when beauty is the beast? What as-
sumptions about gender identity, sexuality, and aggression—or even
of the stability of identity itself—could such narratives challenge?
Two novellas featuring female werewolves written nearly four decades
apart, Clemence Housman’s The Were-wolf (1890) and Aino Kallas’s
The Wolf’s Bride (1928), radically explore women’s embodiment and
consider ways in which monstrosity could serve a positive, liberating
purpose. Housman and Kallas adapt the long mythological history of
shapeshifting women and of the werewolf to craft new figures of tacit
resistance from imposed gender roles and proscriptive sexual identities
and practices.
Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf (1890) explores social purity,
asexuality, female spinsterhood, gender fluidity, athleticism, and ratio-
nal dress through the glamorous figure of White Fell. Once again, the
feminist female werewolf finds dramatic modernist expression in Aino
Kallas’s Sudenmorsian, translated The Wolf’s Bride (1928). 2 Kallas
draws from her transnational, cosmopolitan milieu, notably post-­
suffrage and post-Freudian, to explore the symbolic and sexual power
of a female werewolf. Through Aalo, her lupine heroine, she venerates
women’s sexual pleasure and agency, while meditating on motherhood,
community, and polyamory. For both authors, the transformed body is
no longer pure liability, but rather a vital source of power, pleasure, and
independence.
These texts buck not only the general feminist tradition which made
clear epistemological distinctions between animalistic physical urges
and female moral reserve, but also the mainstream of fantastic art and
literature that traded in the reverse: combined images of atavistic female
evil. Certainly, when mainstream (and mostly male-crafted) imaginative
arts flipped the narrative to embody supernatural women, they primarily
did so by externalizing male characters’ sexual desires onto the female-­
creatures, crafting them as seductive femmes fatales. Of hundreds of
candidates to exemplify this trend in the late nineteenth century, one
need only think of Machen’s Helen, Stoker’s Lucy, or Haggard’s Aisha
to understand this configuration. In this line of thought, though admi-
rably expanded, Du Coudray identifies the nineteenth century’s discor-
dant cacophony of discourses around gender, sexuality, psychology, and
embodiment as fertile ground for its many narratives often featuring
female werewolves. She recognizes in the female of the species “a vivid
icon of Gothic monstrosity,” a unique node in the larger discussion of
hybrid identity, in part because they so “consistently embodied differ-
ence” (Du Coudray 1–2, 2).
206 Lizzie Harris McCormick
This leads to queer dimensions of werewolf ontology, considered in
a wider-historical scope. Bernhardt-House explains that, though it is
“almost universally a sexual creature,” its ongoing transformations
cause any aligned libidinous traits to become always-already queer,
in that the creature’s “hybridity and transgression of species bound-
aries in a unified figure” makes it the “natural signifier for queerness
in myriad forms” (Bernhardt-House 161, 165, 143). Narratively, the
creature ­“disrupts normativity, transgresses the boundaries of pro-
priety, and interferes with the status quo in closed social and sex-
ual situations” (143). Though Housman creates a wolf whose plot is
seemingly asexual and aromantic, Ardel Haefele-Thomas notes the
trope also allows the author to “subtly move away from an explora-
tion of binaries” in order to explore “the possible complex hybridity
embodied” not only by White Fell, but also by “all beings within the
story” (87). Kallas, on the other hand, demonstrates through Aalo’s
shifting shape and social status, as well as the shifting of her lupine
sexual partner, the ways the werewolf reveals “a much greater threat
to any enduring sense of identity” and therefore to heteronormative
bonds (Bernhardt-House 165).
In the form of fearsome beasts, Housman’s and Kallas’s feral hero-
ines (or villains, depending on the reader) experience female physical
autonomy and erotic self-determination. Critically, their texts pursue
the space of human-animal transformation as a kind of progressive ex-
périence limite. Following Nietzsche and Bataille, Foucault describes
the limit-experience as an extreme state of being, such as “madness,
death, crime” or “sex” which summarily “wrenches the subject from
itself” (qtd. in Trombadori 259, 267, 241). Similar to the Classical
Greek ­notion of ekstasis wherein one must move “outside” of oneself
for enlightenment, this allows for the powerful self-transformation
of the subject “through the construction of a knowledge” made pos-
sible by proximity to impossibility, annihilation or diffusion (qtd. in
­Trombadori 256).
The she-wolves in these novels rage against the social and physical lim-
itations of human female embodiment as they exist in the unsustainable-­
but-thrilling space of protean instability. The horror they represent to
the human communities they encounter arises in recognition of their
fantastic excesses, raw experiential knowledge, and freedom from so-
cial bonds. They live, in the words of Kallas’s Aalo, “with a savage and
joyful howl,” quite literally on the edges of being: life and death; hu-
man and animal; masculine and feminine; intellectual and instinctive;
sexual and self-satisfying; and predator and prey (180). Most centrally,
­Housman and Kallas differently feature erotic liberation and the tre-
mendous release of libido as both result and catalyst of their characters’
supernatural awakenings.
 Beauty is the Beast 207
Fantasy: A Genre of Inherent Perversity and
Limitless Mobility
Todorov’s classic The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre (1970)—based almost entirely on texts written by men—makes
it clear that the genre’s diverse menagerie of supernatural beasts and
creatures, many female, should be read as manifestations of libido. He
theorizes that the genre exaggerates the metaphor, so that these beings
imply the unspeakable “excessive forms” and “perversions” of sexual
love (138). His synthetic, structural review of fantastic literature finds
that “desire, as a sensual temptation, finds its incarnation” in supernat-
ural creatures, creating a constant “equivalence …between sexual love
and the infliction of death” (127, 135).
Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin
de Siècle Culture (1986) then explicitly links this trend in images “typ-
ical of the materials” found in art magazines and literature “between
1880–1920” to men’s collective reaction to women’s progress (xi):

When women became increasingly resistant to men’s efforts to teach

them, in the name of progress and evolution, how to behave within
their appointed station in civilization, men’s cultural campaign to
educate their mates, frustrated by women’s “inherently perverse”
unwillingness to conform, escalated into what can truthfully be
called a war on women.
(vii)

As he notes, this war, “largely fought on the battlefield of words and

images” was nonetheless “no less destructive than many real wars” for
its victims who he visualizes having fallen “into the mass grave of lost
human creativity” (vii).3
In these terms, Housman’s and Kallas’s female werewolves ar-
en’t merely subverting a minor literary micro-niche so much as serv-
ing as guerilla fighters in the culture war for the popular imagination.
­Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) does
similar work on a critical level by amending Todorov’s theory to address
the “social and literary implications” of literature, as well as explor-
ing through psychoanalytic reading the ways “it is in the unconscious
that social structures and ‘norms’ are reproduced and sustained within
us” (6). Choosing fantastic narratives gives Housman and Kallas max-
imum leverage to develop as artists and to advance progressive argu-
ments about gender. As Jackson notes, fantastic creatures are useful for
“erasing rigid demarcations of gender and genre” (49). In the fuzzier,
liminal ontological state of the fantastic, creatures have berth to em-
body not-yet-theorized states of being. She notes the emergence of the
208 Lizzie Harris McCormick
open epistemological field offered by fantastic and supernatural texts “at
cultural crossroads” where new ideas are fomenting while older expecta-
tions are “not yet completely dissipated” (24).
Obviously, Housman’s and Kallas’s texts respond to their authors’
very different feminist visions, erotic interests, and nodes in women’s
intellectual and political history. Yet both exist in complicated times
where female embodiment was fomenting new tensions. Their tales em-
bed the pleasures of autonomy and physiological agency in remixed rep-
resentations of atavistic female evil. Both novellas revolt against female
subjugation and the repression inherent in their respective era’s domestic
and social conventions. Their furry protagonists oppose the very hege-
mony of marriage and motherhood, challenging the domestic oppression
and suppressed identity women faced therein. Indeed, they powerfully
create rich transitive space for gender fluidity. They relish freedom—
physical and erotic—and competence, even as they partially underscore
the deadly costs of such independence in a chauvinist world. Their crea-
tures are sinister, but also suffragettes.

New Woman Werewolf: Fin-de-Siècle Feminism and

Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf
In the late Victorian era, feminist activists such as the Elmys and Frances
Swiney considered male sexuality a “selfish, destructive, uncontrolled,
brutalizing force” which caused “outrageous sexual abuse of women in
marriage” (Kent 97). They adopted a kind of anti-corporeal identity for
women not out of the prudery for which they were later blamed, but
in clear ideological resistance to medical and social theories that posi-
tioned the ideal woman as a kind of “breeding and sex machine” wholly
owned by and in the service of her husband (Kent 95). Medical histori-
ans Bowler and Iwan explain that the era’s understanding of physiology
relied on the “Physical Theory” which postulated that “the human body
contained only a finite amount of nervous force” (503). Ergo, as women
used the lion’s share of their “nervous energy” to keep their reproductive
organs in good stead, there was less “available for intellectual activ-
ity” (503). This was the rationale under which women were discouraged
from athletic, educational and other intellectual pursuits.
To challenge the idea a woman’s brain and reproductive body shared
finite resources, one would have to force culture to separate a wom-
an’s mind and soul from the fact of her fleshy incarnation. Yet, to de-­
corporealize female identity was a tricky ideological puzzle; the same
conceptual difference between men’s “‘natural’ lustfulness” and wom-
en’s “more contained and submerged” eroticism was partially ­responsible
for the double moral standard that made women the “ ­ sexual property”
of men rather than owners of their own autonomous, subjective bodies
(Bland xiii). Kent discusses this paradoxical embrace wherein “feminists
 Beauty is the Beast 209
attacked male sexuality and asserted their special differences”—­particularly
those “in the realm of morals and values”—as crafted not “to perpetuate
the existence of separate spheres but in order to eliminate those spheres
through a feminization of society” (86). She explains that they sought to
“extend the qualities associated with women to society at large” thereby
reducing qualitative and moral distinctions between the genders rather
than exaggerating them (86).
In addition, by the 1890s, “the woman question became linked with
the demand for a more open approach to sexuality” (Cunningham 178).
Among the more radical fringe of professional women—educated and em-
ployed or otherwise economically independent—these issues would have
centered around women’s right of refusal perhaps even more than engage-
ment. Kent explains that, staring in the 1880s, the idea of unmarried life
was no longer automatically regarded as “a woman’s failure” but could be
“embraced as a choice” (83). A perceived “assault on marriage” was really
only the expression of “women’s attempts to gain freedom, equality, dig-
nity and respect” (Kent 81). No longer “leftover” women, now those who
chose the autonomy of “intentional spinsterhood” by explicitly rejecting
marriage and motherhood were occasionally seen as being in clear and
noble “revolt against the prescribed feminine role” (Lewis 76, 77). The
independent woman of action was an ascendant, if controversial, figure.
Housman, herself a lifelong “spinster” who relished her freedom
to etch, write, and perform political activism professionally, was no
stranger to these ideas.4 In light of this context, the titular character
her 1890 novella The Were-Wolf is clearly not only a werewolf in the
form of a woman, but a supernatural exaggeration of the professional
New Woman as spinster hero in the battle against male domination. 5
­Housman’s White Fell is a femme fatale who interrupts the extreme sym-
biotic closeness of twin brothers, along with several generations of their
family in their home, when one man, Selwyn, falls madly in love with
her. His twin brother, Christian, immune to her charms, is soon aware
of her true lupine nature. He hunts her down following the mysterious
outdoor deaths of several family members. This quest, taking up the
bulk of the text, is of epic proportions: “Never before was such a race as
this; no, not when in old Greece man and maid raced together with two
fates at stake” (89–90). It is no coincidence that her novella was written
for readers of the adolescent girl’s periodical Atalanta, for its title char-
acter is nothing if not a fin-de-siècle lupine version of the athletic Greek
maiden.6 The text’s feminist energies are more than clear in Housman’s
adaptations of the myth. Indeed, her racer, competing with the fastest
male athlete “of the country-side,” does not lose as in the Greek original,
but rather ties (50). As White Fell is killed, she takes her opponent down
with her. Housman’s White Fell is decidedly amoral and solely interested
in besting suitors and retaining her autonomy. She is a New Woman—
athletic, autonomous, and assertive.
210 Lizzie Harris McCormick
However, Housman’s use of the mythological character and plot
of Atalanta—combined with the fact that the journal, Atalanta, in
which it was eventually published, was edited by L. T. Meade, her-
self a vibrant literary and feminist figure—suggest that the speedy and
independent Greek maiden may have stood for liberation for a gen-
eration of young women. Housman models aspects of her “unwom-
anlike” athlete, her “woman armed,” from Swinburne’s Atalanta in
Calydon (1865), aspects only amplified in Aubrey Beardsley’s etching
“Atalanta in Calydon with the Hound” (1896) (Figure 13.2). ­B eardsley
aggressively amplifies the heroine’s unstable gender by rendering her
head, hair, physique and hat gender-neutral, but giving her dress fem-
inine flourishes that nonetheless echo the male genitalia of classical
statuary. The streamlined hound emerging from between her legs is
yet another phallic gesture.7 ­Housman’s maiden-wolf combines male
strength and feminine beauty, paying homage to the latent androgyny
of ­Swinburne’s text.

Figure 13.2 Aubrey Beardsley, “Atalanta in Calydon with the Hound” (1896).
 Beauty is the Beast 211
White Fell is defined by freedom of movement. Fast and widely trav-
elled, she synthesizes fin-de-siècle imagery of female physical freedom.
Rather than embodying the sexual overtones of the Victorian woman
horse riding or the New Woman a’perch her classic new-tech accessory,
the bicycle, White Fell is both the woman and the means to travel new
vistas independently.8 Housman places her hunting “maiden, tall and
very fair” in a “tunic” which combines Classical lineage with the contem-
porary arguments for rational dress (23).9 This fashion choice embodies
her liberation, as the “fashion of her dress was strange, half masculine,
yet not unwomanly” (23). She also internalizes this combined nature,
proudly boasting of the “bold free huntress life she had lived” and her
prowess and bravery, including the detail that she “fears neither man nor
beast” though “some few fear” her (24).
Everard Hopkins’s illustrations accompanying the 1890 periodical
edition portray her as a traditionally beautiful woman (Figure 13.3).10
However, Clemence Housman’s full symbolic intention seems better
enhanced by the illustrations for the 1896 John Lane edition, crafted
by her lifelong domestic and aesthetic/intellectual partner, her brother
­Lawrence. These especially close siblings, a symbiotic duo, alternated
roles as writer and illustrator on each other’s work and shared a collec-
tive political vision which would later lead them to the forefront of the
suffrage movement in England.11 Lawrence Housman depicts a colossal
and commanding White Fell who dominates the plane, needing to crouch
to fit in both the room and on the page (Figure 13.4). This posture ren-
ders her centaur-like, with half-feral legs, as though her cross-species
transformation is neither stable nor complete. While the figure to her
right is soothing the dog, pictorially, he cowers below her.
Following her introduction, the narrative moves in two overlapping
(yet somewhat incompatible) allegorical directions. The surface plot is a
strange sibling-psychodrama, drawn in the kind of bold Christian sym-
bolic strokes (good and evil; knowledge and ignorance; and vanity and
clarity) that make easy work of thematic analysis.12 White Fell’s role
in that moral universe is simple evil as Christian’s is the reverse; only
Selwyn’s character would participate in the more dynamic ethical and
epistemological arch: temptation, sin, and redemption. Considering that
he gets the least development or space in the text, combined with an
intended readership of adolescent girls, lends doubt to the claim that the
text’s intention is moral edification on the dangers pretty women bring
to undiscerning men. Housman’s life and politics (not to mention those
of her publisher) likewise preclude a moral wherein female independence
is wholesale discouraged.
Read differently, though, there is a rich feminist plot, far more inter-
esting for our purposes, wherein White Fell leverages her androgynous
Amazonian beauty, athletic prowess, and self-determination to avoid
marriage and motherhood while relishing the opportunity to best two
212 Lizzie Harris McCormick

Figure 13.3 E
 . Hopkins, “White Fell” (1890).

extraordinary mortal men in the process, and to develop the moral arc of
both in the process. Indeed, in Christian, the beta-male hero, Housman
crafts an alternative gender narrative. He is an emblem of the kind of
noble, moral creature who moves beyond gender as he takes on the best
aspects of traditional feminine virtue to become a pure human martyr.13
It is his alpha-male brother, Selwyn, whose toxic masculinity blinds him
not only to White Fell’s identity, but to larger truths and values, and pre-
vents him from taking meaningful action in the face of a killer.
After all, like Swinburne’s Atalanta, White Fell is a fatal object for those
who love her. As the former wrote “Not fire nor iron and the wide-mouthed
wars/ Are deadlier than her lips or braided hair./ For of the one comes poi-
son, and a curse/ Falls from the other and burns the lives of men.” White
Fell’s lips are truly deadly, for this perverse Snow White must receive a kiss
from someone before devouring them. Early in the story, her anti-maternal
 Beauty is the Beast 213

Figure 13.4 L
 aurence Housman, “White Fell’s Escape” (1896).

instincts are revealed when the toddler resident in the home is injured. As
she holds him, she stares at his bloody scratch, her face “lighted up with
awful glee” (28). Her first victims, this boy then the household’s resident
older woman, are weak, easily charmed and easily killed.
Once White Fell is socially embedded in the family, she focuses on larger
game. Described solely in superlatives, her primary target, Selwyn, is a
perfect physical specimen, superior to all men in looks and athleticism
with one exception: his twin Christian runs faster. Unlike earlier female
werewolves in literature who target violent men, White Fell is not avenging
crime.14 She flexes her own good looks and violent muscle because her na-
ture is merely competitive; she seeks a worthy opponent, not a guilty one.
A rationalist, Selwyn confuses this predatory attention with romantic
attraction and cannot accept the truth his more spiritual and imaginative
brother sees. Rather, he interprets Christian’s wariness as jealousy. De-
spite this tension, Christian’s resolve grows until he decides to kill White
Fell, the werewolf. Yet he doubts himself enough to want visual proof
the woman is also the beast, so he must chase her until her ­midnight
transformation before attacking.
214 Lizzie Harris McCormick
The second half of the novel describes an epic cross-country night-
time race across a foreboding winter landscape between athletic
White Fell and the world’s fastest man, Christian. Lawrence Hous-
man’s etching, titled “The Race” (Figure 13.5), intentionally forges
stark visual parallels between the two as they run, amplifying the
closeness of the match and of the racers’ capacities. Where the orig-
inal Atalanta lost her race due to an Aphrodite-crafted dirty trick
involving irresistible golden apples, White Fell does not suffer de-
feat. As she and Christian compete for hours, he suffers cognitive
and physical emasculation—losing his sense of reality and almost all
physical vigor while she continues unhindered. As Haefele-Thomas
explains, “he realizes his ‘real form’ is hidden underneath the earthly
male body” (108). Through his own limit-experience with the wolf,
Christian realizes “[h]e could not really be a man, no more than that
running thing was really a woman; his real form was only hidden
under embodiment of a man, but what he was he did not know” (99).
While early readers would have likely presumed this meant he was
disembodied into a purer spiritual being, the language remains quite
conspicuously open to gendered readings.

Figure 13.5 Laurence Housman, “The Race” (1896).

 Beauty is the Beast 215
White Fell is eventually victorious, killing him through her native wolf
power and her masculine wielding of an axe. As midnight hits, the ex-
piring Christian hears a “death scream” that is not his own. In his last
moments he witnesses her double transformation:

the dreadful cry began with a woman’s shriek, and changed and
ended as the yell of a beast. And before the final blank overtook his
dying eyes, he saw that She gave place to It; he saw more, that Life
gave place to Death.
(106)

The cause is not explicated; we know only that “causelessly, incompre-

hensibly” a supernatural force destroys her (106). There are no trick
apples for this modern Atalanta, yet another form of divine interference
responds to Christian’s martyrdom and lays her low.
White Fell embodies the longing for physical autonomy and achieve-
ment many fin-de-siècle women experienced; but she gains them through
a commitment to competition in the world, combined with marital and
sexual autonomy. The myth of Atalanta—the girl who chose to compete
for her own bodily rights and independence—fuses with legends of the
shapeshifting werewolf—to present a fantastic narrative which refer-
ences many complex notes in 1890s feminist thought and desire.

Female Pleasure Principles: Aino Kallas’s

The Wolf’s Bride (1928)
Aino Kallas’s werewolf, Aalo, responds to different personal and cul-
tural sexual politics, over three decades later. From 1912 to 1913, in the
pages of the short-lived, but influential progressive journal The Free-
woman, women expressed ideas of “passion” that extended beyond the
merely physical to include the “more spiritual and more meaningful”
aspects of erotic and romantic love (Bland 272). Frequently linked to
free unions, this idea of idealized, equal merger led to a kind of esoteric
political erotica. Bland quotes one such anonymous writer who, though
“inspired by passionate love—not sexual though tinged with sexual de-
sire” describes how the “expansion suddenly began”: “I not only saw
the vibration of the universe, but in it, the eternal form of the beloved”
(277). Another, likely Dora Mardsen, describes how “the whole was
suffused with the consciousness of calm, radiant, abiding joy” (qtd. in
Bland 277). These women present sexual experience, merged with emo-
tional and intellectual connection, as radical and esoteric.
By the 1920s, a burgeoning interest in representing and valuing wom-
en’s sexual subjectivity and experiences increased dramatically. In the
Post-war era, feminists shifted their energies toward exploring “women’s
relationships to men” (Showalter 197). Inspired by the newly translated
216 Lizzie Harris McCormick
Freud, as well as England’s own sexologists, such as Havelock Ellis, the
radical idea that sexual desire was a “vital part of the human psyche” for
women as much as for men began to catch on, becoming a cause cham-
pioned by the growing progressive vein of male intellectual life (Bruly
76). Many progressive intellectuals, including some feminists, became
interested in women’s erotic liberation, albeit presented as unwaveringly
linked to heterosexual intercourse (Bruly 76). A slightly earlier main-
stream cultural flashpoint makes it clear that desire was now increas-
ingly seen as a universal (rather than male) prerogative: Marie Stopes’s
popular Married Love (1918) advocated for the “mutual pleasure and
enhancement of the sex-union” and provided basic sexual advice to men
in terms of position and female genital physiology in the effort to ensure
women’s erotic pleasure (87). Women no longer were supposed to lie
back and think of England, but perhaps to let their minds and bodies
wander elsewhere.
Sheila Jeffreys presents a more complex history of feminism’s rela-
tionship(s) to this development. In her telling, by the late 1920s, “only
two” activist philosophies became possible: “The pro-sex position and
the anti-sex position” (186). In her history, “sexologists and sex reform-
ers” took up the former mantle to fight against all ascetic ideas. Thus,
they “characterized feminists as ‘anti-sex,’ as prudes and puritans” in
response to their more measured hesitation to wholeheartedly embrace
the new agenda (186). For Jeffreys, the high mark in the movement
was the 1929 Congress of the World League for Sex Reform, primar-
ily organized by Dora Russell and Norman Haire. She summarizes the
three central concerns of the Congress as the “attack on ‘puritanism’,
the problem of women’s frigidity, the vital importance” of coitus (187).
Jeffreys rightly identifies the ways in which these foci logically lead to a
proscription for a kind of mandatory and enthusiastic female participa-
tion in heterosexual activity. She reasonably suggests that the ‘rights’ for
which the reformers claimed to advocate were actually becoming a new
slate of “obligations” for women (188).
Bland, at least on the surface, reverses this to imply that a “younger
generation” of women, now in possession of “a self-identity separate
from marital status or familial obligations” already sought a “sexual
identity, whether heterosexual or lesbian” which would first require the
work of sexologists to bring new ideas about erotic life into public debate
to come into being (emphasis in original 265). Certainly, obvious and
vanilla though it may seem from our vantage point, at least some women
would have benefited from this attention to their sexual pleasure. For
novelist Aino Kallas, whose life and career “powerfully mirror[ed] the
realities and potentials of women during the changing era of the 1920s”
this cultural shift was reflected in new kinds of sexual female protag-
onists in her work (DuBois 206). Certainly, her 1920s multi-text Eros
the Slayer Trilogy—comprised of Barbara von Tisenhusen (1923); The
 Beauty is the Beast 217
Rector of Reigi (1926) and the werewolf-filled text under consideration,
The Wolf’s Bride (1928)—are thick with female sexual longing and
experience and suggests nothing of compulsory egress. DuBois argues
they collectively explore “more deeply the profound issues of women’s
identity and sexuality that came to the fore” in the decade (226). In
these texts, female sexual liberation is counterpoised against patriar-
chal control, representing a critiquing male control over not only the
legal but more critically the affective rights of women. Their motif, most
pronounced in The Wolf’s Bride, is the vibrant woman “whose spiritual
and sexual needs threaten her marriage and her status in society” and in
which these needs call into sharp relief the proximity of love and death
(DuBois 228).
Its heroine, Aalo, is lured into the sublime thrills of werewolf life,
complete with loosened gender regulations and erotic extremes, after
she is plucked out of a marital pastoral idyll by a demonic grey wolf,
aligned with “the archilupus or Arch-Wolf,” identified as Satan (162).
Despite Aalo’s gentle and domesticated demeanor, she cannot resist the
call of the wild and soon discovers the sensual thrills of the bestial sub-
lime: “Never in all her human days had her blood bubbled with such
a golden exaltation and such blissful freedom as now when she ran as
a werewolf” (48). For several blissful months, she volleys between her
pack and demon-wolf lover and her standard-issue human husband and
child. Once she is summarily discovered and exiled, she lives a beastly
life of physical joy and radical freedom. Her fatal flaw is her inability
to fully release the traditional, domestic life she once had. Returning
for a one-night nostalgia flight, Aalo is impregnated by her husband,
then trapped in human form for the duration of her pregnancy (spent in
exile in the woods in seasonally inappropriate clothing). Returning in
labor, she is killed along with the child. Her tale ends miserably twice:
her human form is burned alive in labor, likely-but-never-surely with
her husband’s child; then her wolf form is shot with a bullet made from
the silver of her husband’s wedding ring. Her freedom is doubly done in
through perversions of baby carriage and marriage—standard identity
nodes of female life in the period.
We first meet Aalo among a community of women tenderly washing
sheep where she is non-consensually observed and voyeuristically chosen
by Priidick, her soon-to-be husband. Hidden from view, he observes her
stereotypically benign feminine temperament, which is all “kindness” as
she speaks “gently to the ewe as to a child” (166). This woodsman stays
to secretly view her coming out of the water in soaked clothes, dripping
so that he “clearly beheld the shape of her body, for the wet garments
could not hide her, and her face, which was turned toward him” (166).
As Aalo strips down to wash, he stares “as though stricken by a thun-
derbolt” with “burning glance on her innocence,” ignoring her skin’s
brown, moth-shaped “firemark or witch-mole” (167). As Priidick will
218 Lizzie Harris McCormick
later allow her to be literally burnt to death, there is horrible foreshad-
owing in this passage, the first of many instances where Kallas links
Aalo’s sexualized body and red hair to fire, and therefore to death.
The forester marries her in a minimal narrative transaction that re-
moves Aalo from her first love story. There is neither initial meeting nor
courtship story. Within six months—and one short paragraph—Priidick
progresses from peeping Tom to bridegroom. Aalo moves from an idyllic
women’s community into the closed world of the nuclear family. For a
brief spell she is faultless: “an early riser and a willing helpmeet, neither
over-quick of speech nor moody,” though some neighbors “marveled in
secret” at her red-haired appearance (169). Within a year, she bears and
baptizes a “girlchild.”
Soon thereafter, the “great wolf-hunts” begin again, aligned with a
public celebration. Aalo’s transitive nature is already suggested, as she
arrives “merry as a young fawn,” already-animal wrapped in a “skirt of
lamb-grey” (171, 170). Aalo beholds two wolves, routed by hunters and
dogs, running past her “for their lives” (172). Watching, she has a sud-
den connection to one: “a great and powerful beast” with “slanting wild
eyes full of the fury of the wilds” (172). Simultaneously, she telepathi-
cally hears “very clear and very plain”: “Aalo, little maid Aalo, comest
thou with me to the marshes” (172). The feeling is mutual.
The wolf’s presence and voice awaken her physically and psychically
into an uncomfortable rapture reminiscent of that of Yeats’s famous
Leda. Texts held side by side, it seems an intentional echo; where the
Irish poet described the young Greek maiden overwhelmed by the god as
“Being so caught up, / So mastered by the brute blood of the air,” Aalo’s

soul and even her body were rudely shaken by a great whirlwind, as
though some mighty power had borne her up from her foothold in
the air, and then with a vast upheaving whirled her about in a holy
tempest, like the smoky down of a bird, till her breath was choked
and she was nigh to swooning where she stood.
(Yeats 96; Housman 172)

Unlike Yeats’s swan, the wolf will not prove “indifferent” or “drop” her,
but rather bring her powerful embodied experiences. She will not only
“put on his knowledge with his power” but discover the fullest dimen-
sions of freedom and sexual expression.
The grey wolf’s next psychic salvo begs Aalo to “keep company with a
wolf in the marshes” (172). This phrase is described as both a “bidding”
but also, interestingly (and confoundingly) “a decoy call” (173). This
time the voice is described invasively: “at that moment a daemon entered
into her, so that she was bewitched” (173). Yet she is not totally lost.
Throughout the spring, without quite understanding why, Aalo is “care-
ful” to avoid the marshes and woods alone, although torn “between
 Beauty is the Beast 219
fear and lust” (175). This precarious balance is upset when her husband
leaves on a trip corresponding with Midsummer Night, an inauspicious
omen, since this date is “full of magic” and marks the occasion where
“deamons wander free and witches work their black magic” (176). When
evening comes, she again hears the wolf’s telepathic song: “Aalo—Aalo,
my maiden—wilt thou be a wolf on the marshes?” (177).
Kallas blends destiny with choice, and obedience with self-­
determination. While the demon’s call is “a command invincible that
must be obeyed,” Aalo “of her own will … surrendered her spirit, soul
and body, to the daemon, to be guided thereafter by him” (177, emphases
added).15 She leaves her child, home, and community to walk barefooted
into a magical woodland landscape fecund with flora and herbs wrapped
in moonlit white smoke. Blue-flames emerge, linked in Finnish legend
both to gold and to demons, from braken ferns as hundreds of grass-
snakes move in unnatural ways, dancing or spinning “like hoops” (179).
After crossing this liminal, mystical space, Aalo sees the masterful
grey beast from the hunt, sitting as the leader of a circle of wolves. As a
“new wolf-skin of a tawny grey” awaits her, is seems she is expected by
this community (179). Throwing the pelt over her shoulders, she “felt her
body change past all knowing” into a wolf (179). Her physical transfor-
mations are itemized visually:

the white skin of her body became covered with tangled fur, her
little face sharpened into the long muzzle of the wolf, her delicate
ears were changed into the uprising ears of a wolf, her teeth into
fierce fangs, and her fingernails into the crooked claws of a beast of
the wilds.
(179–80)

An internal somatic “awakening” accompanies the more explicit bodily

changes. Now she feels “all the passions and lusts of the wolf, the lust for
blood and the lust to tear and mangle, for even her blood had turned into
the blood of a wolf, and she was of their number” (180). In her transformed
body, she joins the chorus of wolves “with a savage and joyful howl” (180).
Among her subtler shifts is that in status: she is no longer defined by the
hierarchical dyadic relationship to her husband, but as a coequal member
of a broad community joined in the full collective expression of physical
life. Freed from a limited human form and limiting society, Aalo’s libera-
tion is manifested through unstopped drives and desires.16 Transformed,
she feels herself and the world grow “strange and new” (181). Aalo too
revels in her superhuman strength and the rich tapestry of scents now
available to her which “truly did awaken a great excitement” and “made
her dizzy as though her blood had become intoxicated” (181).
Kallas uses language of superlative, orgasmic intensity in presenting
now-wild Aalo and distinguishing these exhilarating experiences from
220 Lizzie Harris McCormick
her mundane human life: “never in her human days had her blood boiled
with such a golden exultation and such blissful freedom as now when
she ran, a werewolf, across the marsh. For the delight of this lustful-
ness is beyond dreaming” (182). Kallas breaks werewolf tradition to give
Aalo and her packmates a uniquely elevated moral status. Aalo’s violent
initiation—her so called “baptism of blood” ordained by Satan—is rel-
atively tame; neither she nor her lupine colleagues seem interested in
human flesh though this taboo practice is “a foundational belief about
werewolves” (Lonngren 91). Rather, not unlike fine dining humans, they
kill and eat a calf a la tartare. Their dietary restraint, combined with
Aalo’s continued post-transformation daytime kindness, suggests that
Kallas is carving out social space for the woman who transgresses mar-
ital and gender bounds without violating larger humanistic and ethical
categories. In this, her text can be seen as responding to—and perhaps
­literalizing—Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927). Like its central character,
Aalo has both a civilized and wild side; and like Hesse (and Foucault),
Kallas implies that embracing the inner “wolf” through physical and
psychological extremes (for him, sex and drugs, for her, sex and free-
dom) is a path to self-knowledge, a beneficial limit-experience, rather
than a one-way ticket to self-destruction.
As she begins to run with the alpha-wolf, Aalo discovers the pleasures
of partnership based on co-equal performance, rather than the human
separate-sphere subjugation of her former life:

And with amazement she felt that she was the match of this big
wolf in strength and swift to run level with his every stride, even
though he sped faster and faster…for the same wild fever of the
blood burned in their wolf’s veins, and the same fire of the spirit
shook their wolvish hearts.
(183)

They share physical capabilities and experience “the same” libidinous

and liberating energies. As we saw with White Fell, the female werewolf
flourishes beyond the Gothic enclosure, bounding through the great
wide expanses and rolling forests where her topographical freedom ex-
ternalizes her internal liberation. Soon thereafter, Aalo discovers new
levels of physical pleasure. Her companion wolf changes his form to
reveal his wood demon nature before a scene of sexual merger. This
amorphous and almost-genderless passion provides overwhelming

bliss beyond measure, too great for mortal enjoyment …. all bound-
aries between them fell away, and they melted each into the other,
like two dewdrops, and no one could have known which was which,
or told one from the other.
(184)
 Beauty is the Beast 221
As Malkas and others have noted, Satan itself is never clearly “person-
ified or gendered” (83). Therefore, it “cannot be seen as a masculine
force. Rather, it seems intimately tied up with a wild form of femininity”
(Faxneld 195). Which or whatever corporal form it takes—combined
with Aalo’s own transitory form—make this merger multivalently sex-
ual and yet, de-corporealized into total psychic merger.
This extreme experience does not erase Aalo’s domestic drive. Now
actively polyamorous, Aalo is “full of lusts,” running nightly from her
“marriage bed into the forests,” the “passions of the werewolf quicken-
ing in her blood” (186). Interestingly, her werewolf relationship does not
take away from her human one; it enhances it. So long as she “live[s] two
lives, being in turn a wolf and a human being,” she is “twice as lively”
in her domestic activity and “sweeter than ever” to her spouse (186).17
In this mixed phase, she levels several ontological playing fields. Where
her human spouse, a woodsman, claims outdoor freedom by day while
she is housebound, her second life at night reverses the geography of
gender and genus; Aalo roams freely while her husband slumbers in-
doors. Where her evening senses are only heightened, he sleeps insensate
through her twilight exit and predawn reentry.
She is discovered when, in a strange sympathetic irony, “as an ani-
mal divines the approach of thunder,” her husband instinctively senses
she is his “enemy” (192). Soon, “lightning seemed to flash through his
soul” providing him intuitively with the truth (192). Aalo’s subsequent
confession is coming-out manifesto of self-determination and indepen-
dence: “even if I were to roam as a wolf, and a wolf’s blood to burn in
my veins, it concerns not others, for the salvation or damnation of my
soul is for me alone” (193). She lets him know she was born this way:
“Hear me, Priidick, for my bosom burns as with a furnace…only in the
wilds am I free and have my joy…I am of the tribe of wolves…for such
was I created” (193). The crisis of confrontation allows her to articulate
her needs and wants. Among these is a need to escape, either part-time
or full-time, from the constraints of human female expectations: asked
about her extracurricular erotic life, she simply states “when I am a wolf
I do wolf’s deeds” (195).
Though she might have preferred to find some balance between do-
mestic life and wild experience, her discovery means she must choose.
Unfortunately, her inability to fully commit to the latter sets her demise
into action. A year after she first left, she comes back at night to visit and
breastfeed her child and then make love to her husband, who tells him-
self that it is a dream. Though appearing “meek and gentle” as before,
she initiates the sexual action asking “How is it with thee, dear Priidick.
Is thy bed cold?” (203, 204). Their erotic embrace lacks the intensity
of her nights with the wolf, but is filled with familiarity. They hold one
another all night, “piteously and lovingly” (204). After she disappears
into the dawn, Priidick tells no one as he believes it was not real, but
222 Lizzie Harris McCormick
only “a dream vision and the image of his own longing” (205). He can
rationalize and deny sexual behavior, but Aalo—despite her fantastic
knowledge and agency—cannot.
When she reemerges in human form nine months later, “fainting from
weariness,” she is doubled over in labor (205). “Clothed in tatters,” she
has lost any of her former glamour or vitality:

And of the beauty of her face there was nothing left, for the cold and
the blizzards and the winds of spring had worn it away, even as rain
washes away paint. And her white skin was chafed and swollen, her
feet were bleeding from sounds, and indeed she was a pitiful sight.
(206)

Her condition suggests she has lived in the elements in human form for
months. Kallas denies her character the ability to not only labor and
give birth in wolf form, but also thrive as a pregnant woman. In this text
of divine-diabolic interventions, supernatural insight and potential, and
female liberation, the very real mechanics and requirements of maternity
are omnipotent.
A young handmaiden encounters Aalo and “wrestles in spirit” be-
tween avoiding this representative of Satan and the Good Samaritan
rule (206). Choosing the later, she prepared the sauna. However, the
older women turn bestial, surrounding laboring Aalo like “a flock like
ravens” to interrogate her. Once he returns, Priidick denies her “so great
was his bitterness and shame,” though it will mean her death and that
of their child (208).
In some ways this scene echoes the “unwed mother” morality texts
common decades earlier; like them it features a poor wayward woman
who tragically pays the uneven price for human sexual relations, a cruel
or cowardly father who walks away unscathed, and a babe denied legit-
imacy and, in this case, life itself. Yet Kallas does not seem particularly
committed to a didactic agenda for, say, contraception or child support.
Rather, this scene can be read as developing an argument for full and
complete self-acknowledgement or fulfillment.18 If Aalo had not second-­
guessed her destiny—had not denied her purpose as already bearing the
“mark of Satan”—and had stayed with the wolves, she would be free
of this predicament (168). Her child is a hybrid creature representing
her own self-doubt and self-limiting pull toward traditional feminine
life. Its death, due in part to its ambivalent parentage and potential bes-
tial nature, reads as pitiful and tragic. Yet is amplifies the intensity of
the human community’s rejection of hybridity and fluidity of all kinds.
The werewolves in the woods are a trinity of transitory natures: bes-
tial, human, and albeit darkly divine. They are not clearly gendered
in non-human forms, nor do they have any clear gendered roles in the
pack, beyond the sometimes-male leader. In stark contrast, the animus
 Beauty is the Beast 223
of the human community is clearly identity-based. For Aalo to fulfill
her destiny, she must turn her back on this limited traditional world and
commit to the wilds. Looking and leaping forward only brought her joy,
fulfillment and ecstasy. It is in looking back, like Lot’s wife, that Aalo is
transformed into not salt but ash.

*****

Housman’s and Kallas’s fantastic tales of female werewolves interrogate

gender and sexuality identities in ways intimately linked to the corpo-
reality of the beast and the diffuse feminist conversations of their days.
Their subjects are femme fatales, but they are also avatars for longed-­
after freedoms, especially those athletic, erotic, and aesthetic. They are
not simply the anti-natural, anti-family stock automatons and fiends
that populate much of fantastic literature. They only partially embody
the perverse energies of the non-human. For every trope of feminine
evil, they evoke, there is another they dismantle. Their narratives al-
most always encode and enforce powerful ethical and social messages—­
radically reimagined—not only about male-female relationships, or
about female self-determination and physical agency, but even about the
very stability of identity itself. Beneath plots easy enough to categorize
as parables of good-vs-evil or cautionary tales about the “cost” of female
empowerment, Housman and Kallas plant the seeds of radically new
ways to see female-of-center embodiment through fantastic scenes of
aesthetic, emotional, and physical fulfillment. Their texts wrap the wolf
of radical feminist conceptions about the body in a soft sheep’s clothing
of surface fantasy and morality storytelling. But the heart beating within
is no passive lamb’s, it belongs to a feral and fully realized beast.

Notes
1 For a fuller discussion, see Marina Warner, From Beast to the Blonde, and
Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale.
2 Though this collection is based on English-language texts, Kallas is unique
in that she was a central player in England’s modernist literary and social
circles and each of her texts was almost-immediately published into well-­
reviewed English translations.
3 He argues this vision is not hyperbolic, for he sees in this ideological battle
the raw materials that would, in short order, allow for “the implementation
of the genocidal race theories of Nazi Germany” (vii).
4 A full discussion of her life, career, and activism can be found in Oakley’s
Inseparable Siblings.
5 This essay relies on text from the book length edition published in 1896 by
John Lane featuring illustrations by Lawrence Housman. However, I also
discuss the context of the novel’s original publication and one image from
the 1890 edition, first published in the journal Atalanta. Both texts appear
in the Works Cited. For a more robust comparative discussion of the illustra-
tions, see Rechelle Christie.
224 Lizzie Harris McCormick
6 Interestingly, in some legends Atalanta too shape-shifted, though into a lion.
7 In another of his etchings from the period, a more feminine version of
­Atalanta appears, nonetheless with similarly pubic flourishes, brandishing
a stick held perpendicular to her pelvis.
8 See Sarah Wintle for a further discussion of female athleticism and mobility.
9 It is more often noted that White Fell’s furry white human attire, mirrored
when she shifts into a white wolf, pays direct homage to her two most well-
known literary predecessors, Capt. F. Marryat’s Christina (notably, the first
werewolf in English Literature) and Sir Gilbert Campbell’s Ravina.
10 A speculative argument can be made that Hopkins’s White Fell is perhaps
modeled after Annie Oakley who had just then finished up a tour as a head-
liner with Buffalo Bill and was “a media sensation” in England.
11 A rich discussion of Clemence and Lawrence Housman’s lives, relationship
and careers can be found in Elizabeth Oakley’s Inseperable Siblings (2009).
12 See Hodges for a full explication.
13 I am indebted to Ardel Haefele-Thomas for my understanding of Christian’s
relationship to gender in the novel.
14 It is worth noting that both Marryat’s and Campell’s female werewolves,
while standard-bearers of atavistic female evil, are both avenging agents
who only appear in men’s lives following narratives in which those men
doled out extreme domestic cruelty and neglect towards other women and
children.
15 The use of the word “daemon” here, as well as on page 217, echo Kallas’s
own usage of the term in her diaries, where it is intended to represent her
literary muse. This linguistic overlap supports Per Faxneld’s concept that
Kallas engages in “Satanic feminism,” wherein Satan is seen as an “emanci-
pator of women” (143). He allows them access to lives beyond the domestic,
including sexual experience and indulgence of what Rachilde (who believed
herself descended from werewolves) earlier called “the monstrosity of …
desire to write” (qtd. in Faxneld 190).
16 This can be contrasted to the canine heroine of Virginia Woolf’s Flush
(1933). In her introduction Sally Beauman makes this reversal clear: “Al-
though ostensibly about the taming of a pedigree dog, Flush addresses the
way society tames and classifies women.”
17 In an interesting inconsistency or counterbalance, the text now implies a
growing transformation of her character from “kind,” “timid,” and “virtu-
ous” to “bloodthirsty,” “Cruel” “over-bold,” and “lusty” (186). We learn
“no deed” was “bloody enough to awaken her horror” (187).
18 Kallas herself failed to make this choice entire life. She was torn between
love affairs and stable marriage; radical thoughts and public respectability; a
writing career and the requirements of motherhood. Leena Kurvet-Käossar
has published widely on Kallas. Her Embodies Subjectivities provides a full
analysis of the relevant aspects of Kallas’s diaries and life.

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Bland, Lucy. Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists. New
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 Beauty is the Beast 225
Bowler, Peter J. and Iwan R. Morus. Making Modern Science: A Historical
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Bruley, Sue. Women in Britain since 1900. St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
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226 Lizzie Harris McCormick
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14 The Doctor Treats the
Ten-Breasted Monster
Medicine, the Fantastic Body,
and Ideological Abuse in
Djuna Barnes’s Ryder
Kate Schnur

At the halfway point of Ryder—Djuna Barnes’s 1928 chronicle of the

fictional Ryder family—the patriarch, Wendell, takes two of his chil-
dren, Julie and Timothy, on a fishing trip, declaring, “Fish … are cool
and firm like the handshake of a friend. Let us go fishing!” (117).1
In response to his children’s request for a story while on the boat,
Wendell tells the story of the Beast Thingumbob and his thinly hoofed,
coiled-haired, ten-breasted lover with the “not yet” face (119). Like his
lover, the Beast Thingumbob is a compilation of several features of zoo-
logical and mythical creatures: he has wings, claws, paws, feathers, and
fur. As Wendell describes it, both the Beast and his lover were of “large
limbs” and a “beauty outside the imagination” (119).
The love story between the Beast Thingumbob and his ten-breasted
mate is a tragic one, and one that, I argue, is key to understanding how
Ryder is a critique of ideological indoctrination. At the beginning of
the tale, Wendell warns his audience that the lover would live on Earth
for only one harvest season, lasting “ten hundred and ten years,” after
which she would return to the gods (120). Wendell provides the follow-
ing description of the lover:

She was not a virgin as other women are, or to be reckoned as other

lives are, neither had she birth as we have … for the underworld had
fathered and mothered her, one and the same, so that she had no
seam in the soul, either on the one side or on the other side.
(119)

Later in his telling of the story, he elaborates on what it means for a

near-immortal, animalistic, descendent of heaven and hell to be a virgin:

Thus she was a virgin, but not as other women, for because of these
things, she had a greater share than any mortal woman could bear
or possibly see to put up with, but to her the putting up was not great
business.
(120)
228 Kate Schnur
Though a virgin, she was not a virgin in the same way as human women.
According to Wendell’s formulation, though she lived far longer than
they, she did not mind the wait for sexual experience.
The strangeness of Wendell’s story of the Beast Thingumbob—its fan-
tastic nature, overt sexual content, and its unusual emphasis on virginity
and motherhood for a child’s story—is almost undetectable in the midst
of the antics of the Ryders, fictionalized from those of Barnes’s own fam-
ily. Wendell, based on Barnes’s father, is an antiestablishment activist,
one who rejects the state’s control over the private lives of its citizens.
Wendell constructs his family around his core beliefs: polygamy; free-
love (for men, at least); frequent sexual abuse of women; procreative
sex; non-traditional education; and a strong rejection of a centralized
societal organization and infrastructure. Ryder is the disjointed narra-
tion covering several different generations, but centered on Wendell. It
covers his parents’ affair, his simultaneous marriages, his maintenance
of his polygamous family in defiance of state authority, his other sexual
affairs, the births of his many children, and the deaths of many of his
mistresses in childbirth. Its pastiche narrative is matched by its language,
which references literary styles that range from the King James Bible to
Renaissance literature to twentieth-century vernacular, and its lengthy,
rambling sentences often obfuscate their own meaning (Caseli 26).
As Andrew Field notes in his biography of Barnes, there are two mascu-
line authoritative figures in Ryder (31).2 Because maternity is at the center
of the society of Ryder, Dr. O’Connor, the town licensed gynecologist,
makes frequent appearances throughout the text, often as an answer to
Wendell’s brute violence and heterosexual masculinity. Barnes based this
character on the unlicensed gynecologist—Dan Mahoney—who would
perform abortions in underground Paris.3 As a gynecologist who has sex
with men and dresses as a woman, O’Connor rejects the sexual and gen-
der expressions that are a part of Wendell’s prescriptions for masculinity.
He occupies a medically sanctioned role that allows him to help treat and
mitigate the painful and fatal consequences of Ryder sexuality. Indeed, it
is difficult to place a cohesive reading on Dr. ­O’Connor. He is white, ed-
ucated, and seemingly successful, and these states of privilege allow him
to participate in the project of sexual regulation and stand on the side of
established government and science, despite his non-normative gender ex-
pression and sexuality. He is the alternative male authority to W ­ endell—
whose influence on his many children is clearly toxic—but the ideology
he offers to the Ryder children of science-­based readings of the body and
normative behavior is similarly limiting and controlling. At the same time,
because his own acts defy gender regulation, O’Connor is a satirical char-
acter who undermines the efficacy and power of the very regulatory sys-
tems that he sought to protect from Ryder’s thought-based revolution.
Given Wendell’s worldview—that women’s purpose is to only be lover
and mother—as well as his proclivity toward pedagogy of his own young
children, the story of the Beast Thingumbob and his lover fits seamlessly
 The Doctor Treats the Ten-Breasted Monster 229
into the Ryder narrative, particularly the fairy tale’s end. ­Before the lover
agrees to lose her virginity to Thingumbob, she asks for proof that he
loves her in the form of a promise to bury her once she is dead, which
foreshadows her inevitable demise. In the final scene of the story, the
lover lives just long enough to give Thingumbob a litter of ten sons. Her
dying words are,

I shall die beneath you, yet from my body you shall garner ten sons,
and they shall be harnessed of terribleness, and you shall bury me
quickly, for I am burst asunder at their way within me, for they come
marching, and I rejoice and go from this hour no further.
(121)

This child’s story ends with Thingumbob pulling his ten children from his
now-dead lover’s body: he spends his remaining life mourning her and the
“useless gift of love” she left him, while she, however, dies happily, know-
ing she had served her purpose. The close of this sub-narrative is contradic-
tory. Though the lover dies happy that she has filled her role, Thingumbob
still mourns her loss and ultimately labels the offspring useless. The story
suggests the difficulty in tracing the love of women, the need to abuse them
to death, the desire for children, and the seeming simultaneous contempt
for them that plays out in the story and in ­Wendell’s philosophy.
Julie, who is half the audience for this fairytale, is the oldest daughter of
Amelia, the first woman Wendell married. She spent her childhood at her
mother’s bedside during the delivery of her four siblings, listening to her
mother repeatedly declare “I shall die this time” (95). The pain and threat
of death that accompanies every birth is a fact of Julie’s life; for her, the
fact that the lover happily dies in childbirth may be the most unrealistic
element of Wendell’s story, despite the winged, near-­immortal monsters.
Far from being offended, however, Julie finds the story underwhelming in
the face of her everyday reality. She asks her father: “Is that all?” (121).
It is easy to sympathize with Julie’s dissatisfaction. Though Wendell
spends some time building his description of Thingumbob’s desire—how
it clung to “his hide, and his hair and his blood and his bone, in his claws
and his heart, and in his boiling thoughts, and shone down from his eyes
like flakes of fire” —Thingumbob’s lover does not receive similar treat-
ment (119). Instead, Wendell provides a meditation on what it would
mean for a mythical beast to be a virgin. Furthermore, she is faceless and
only named once. Indeed, even her name— “The Cheerful” —is a glib
reference to how she was unable to feel pity for anyone because

the passing away of man and beast was of no moment to her, for that
they no sooner said, ‘Here am I,’ than they said also in the drawing
back of their breath ‘here I am not.’ So it was said of her that she
knew not of pity.
(120)
230 Kate Schnur
Though her name references a familiar emotion, it ironically signals her
lack of empathy, thereby casting her as poor motherly material, and sug-
gests that her death is better for all. Her demise is, on all counts, the sto-
ry’s happily ever after. While the emotions of the winged Thingumbob
are as relatable as possible, “The Cheerful” is only defined by the human
feelings she does not have before the narrative quickly kills her. In a
story that a father tells to entertain his children, a romantic—though
monstrous—couple unite, but the narrative replaces the expected, tra-
ditional “happy ending” with a resolution that leaves the hero with the
children he wanted and the heroine dead, having served her purpose.
In drawing upon the tradition in trauma theory of studying children’s
engagement with fairy tales in the place of trauma, I will argue that in the
context of Barnes’s novel, however, we can hardly assume that the love
story of Thingumbob is meant to provide any escape for Julie. Like most
of Ryder, elements of the story of Beast Thingumbob are so preposterous
that it could read as a tragic, yet dry and satiric, escape from the sexual
abuses inherent in the construction of this family and its surrounding so-
ciety. In this chapter, I argue that the supernatural, the fantastic, and the
fairy tale are all methods of ideological control that Wendell wields over
the Ryder children. The alternative modes of narrative that the fantasy
affords do not provide an escape for the children, but for Wendell. In
Ryder, fantasy functions as parable: as a means of education and indoc-
trination into the civic, sexual, and even religious principles of Wendell
Ryder, or as the text names him, “Jesus Mundane.” For Wendell, the
fantastic is a narrative genre that is parallel to the antiestablishment sex-
ual, educational, and political paradigm that he preaches to his family
and neighbors. It is an alternative for describing the body in the sexual
and familial relationships that are part of his proposed utopia. Notably,
it is a mode of education that easily appeals to his children. As the text
suggests, Wendell does not force the story of Beast Thingumbob on his
children. They ask for it in this moment of father-child bonding, and in
so doing offer him this opportunity for indoctrination.
This is not a text, however, in which empirical “reality” offers bodily
or ideological freedom from this control. In a pastiche of competing
modes of narrative authority and literary genre, Barnes constructs a
competition between the fantastic and the scientific over the ideas and
bodies of the Ryder children. In pitting two male authority figures
against each other, Barnes effectively creates a tension between two
forms of knowledge production. The first comprises Wendell’s fantas-
tic tales that support his promiscuous sexuality and polygamy, and the
second is O’Connor’s “fact-based” understanding of the body and code
of sexual morality. The dissemination of these two forms of knowledge
highlight how Wendell and O’Connor use their narrative authority to
define the “natural” and “unnatural,” how their efforts to do so shape
the place of the women in the Ryder society, and how their respective
 The Doctor Treats the Ten-Breasted Monster 231
narratives make sense of the place of children in such a society. Barnes
puts pressure on the potential for sexual social progress in fantastic
spaces, and purposefully confuses what she perceived as the all-too-neat
divide between the supernatural and the empirical.
In this context, the tale of Beast Thingumbob and the Cheerful be-
comes not just a satirically and ludicrously odd children’s story, but a
part of Wendell and O’Connor’s struggle over the Ryder children. In
a text preoccupied with procreation and the generation of generations,
the two men compete over the indoctrination of Wendell’s children. In
the ensemble-like cast of Ryder, composed of Wendell’s wives and their
children and his other partners and their children, all the women of
Ryder are meant to eventually become mothers, if not necessarily wives.
At stake in this battle of ideological control is the ability to tell young
women—particularly Julie, who critics read as a fictionalized Djuna—
how they should use their bodies and young men how to treat women’s
bodies.4 This competition co-opts all forms of narrative in the text, in-
cluding the supernatural and fantastic. Storytelling becomes a top-down
act of inculcation designed by men to “properly” train children. In the
wake of this, I argue that it becomes necessary for us as readers to look
for moments that resist this model of narration. Through Julie, we will
find moments where narrating becomes collaborative, and where the
audience finds agency. We must find moments when Julie attempts to
participate in, take control of, or resist the practices of narration and
storytelling.

“Her Ways Were Not Our Ways”: Defining the

Fantastic in Ryder
The family life that Wald Barnes—Djuna’s father—established was a
community that consisted of an extended family built upon his polyg-
amous relationships and his too many children. In writings that justi-
fied this lifestyle, he argued that polygamy would reduce poverty and the
number of single mothers, which would allow for greater social stability
(31).5 His logic may be unique, but his causes echoed those of the anar-
chist and free love movements of bohemian New York and the political
Left that were mobilizing in the late nineteenth century during Djuna’s
childhood and persisted into the 1920s when she wrote and published
Ryder. Wald Barnes’s endorsement of antiestablishment thought and
critique of monogamy stands in line with political radicals’—including
Emma ­Goldman’s—­celebrations of free love as an opportunity for wom-
en’s agency and empowerment in sexual relationships.6
In Ryder, however, Barnes creates a small society that circulates around
the anarchist theory of Wendell Ryder, based on those of Wald Barnes.
She delineates the gendered physical and sexual abuse women—­including,
biographers suggest, Barnes herself—sustained through, at the very least,
232 Kate Schnur
Wald’s particular brand of polygamy, if not the potential abuses at risk
in the free love movement more generally. In putting the misogyny of free
love and polygamy on display, Barnes predominately focuses on the pain
and mortality of motherhood. In his biography of Barnes, Phillip Herring
notes that after she watched both her mother and Wald’s second wife
give birth, Barnes grew convinced that no author had yet properly por-
trayed the experience of birth and wrote Ryder to address this gap (33).
­Indeed, in her history of birth control in twentieth-century literature,
Beth ­Widmaier Capo argues that Ryder is one of the best encapsulations
of the risks of motherhood and the physical dangers that unregulated
fertility pose to women’s health and autonomy (32–33).
The integrity of the female body is constantly in danger in Ryder,
though how the reader is meant to process this threat is unclear. The nar-
rative snippets of the Ryder family history are scattered among prayers
for women who die in childbirth, merry songs for the vast number of
rapes that herald the coming of spring, bawdy illustrations of angels
peeping under each other’s gowns, and women urinating into chamber
pots, and an epic that details Wendell’s work and his sexual exploits.
In the chapter entitled “Rape and Repining,” the third-person narrator
sings a song in Renaissance style on the occasion of the yearly spring
rape. It is difficult to trace the text’s inconsistent attitude toward rape, as
the narrator frequently switches between celebratory exclamations like
“Ah, dilly, dilly, dilly,” exclamations of mourning like “Alas! Alack,”
and exclamations of disdain for the women who allow their rape to hap-
pen: “Fie upon you!” (21, 23, 25). The narrator announces a woman’s
loss of her virginity through roundabout euphemism and direct refer-
ence to the violence that accompanied the sexual encounter:

A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday

sun upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now,
to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother’s Mother before
her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged!
Ransacked! No purer than Fish in Sea, no sweeter than Bird on
Wing, no better than Beasts of Earth!
(21)

The narrator makes clear the certainty of this phenomenon, as well as

its place in a larger, intergenerational, perpetual trauma that sex brings
to the women of this society. The consequence of Wendell’s politics and
embrace of promiscuous sexuality is that the women who willingly en-
gage in frequent sexual activity are praised, and those who resist are
frequently raped. In either case, pregnancy is always a threat to these
women, and injury and death are always risks of sex.
This gendered consequence of his lifestyle, however, is of no concern
to Wendell Ryder: rather, it is a necessary part of the philosophy, or
 The Doctor Treats the Ten-Breasted Monster 233
perhaps “theology” he preaches. Throughout the text, Barnes makes clear
­Wendell’s self-perceived status as a prophet or “Jesus” figure and his role
as the sole-protector of the liberty of his children’s minds. Indeed, in the
first chapter, properly titled “Jesus Mundane: By Way of Introduction,”
God rebukes Wendell, warning him to avoid those who are “distracted
with thy salvation and the salvation of thy people” (3). Because of this dis-
traction, the “people” fail to recognize the actions of Wendell and his fam-
ily as they continue to focus on abstracted but absolute religious truths.
Instead, Wendell should stay with “lesser men” who have a “greater ca-
pacity” for the “unfinished and uncertain” (3). Introduced as the Jesus
of the average man, Wendell is a religious symbol for the man who has
been restrained by the overreach of established government, science, and
religion, all of which seek to dictate the organization of his life and family.
Wendell’s anarchist politics are a means to resist control and to allow for
the uncertainty that comes from releasing himself from the establishment.
As “Jesus,” Wendell frequently finds himself pitted against those con-
cerned with saving him, or at least his family, from himself and his di-
rection. Just shortly after the fishing trip, an encounter between Wendell
and state officials highlights the importance of narrative control and
education for Wendell. As a part of his free society project, Wendell re-
fuses to send his children to school, insisting that they will learn better at
home, under his tutelage. How and what they learn we are left to deduce
from his speeches, aphorisms, and stories, as we see in his comparison of
fish and handshakes referenced above. In “The Cat that Comes Out of
the Wall,” a truancy officer comes to Wendell’s door after the neighbors
report him for keeping his children home from school. Defending him-
self against the charges, Wendell argues:

Do you know what makes a man desperate and what makes him
happy?…Religion makes him a coward, and education, as you
understand it, makes him a monologuist in the presence of God,
instead of a disciple…The Board of Education provides dates and
speeches, half forgotten, of dead statement. They feel that they have
done their duty if a child can render Hamlet backward, and the
Commandments sideways; so I keep my children at home and teach
them better.
(129–130)

Wendell, of course, wins the battle. And, on the surface of this speech,
Wendell is the antiestablishment hero. He precisely pinpoints the flaws
of the American education system as he sees them: it does not encourage
“true” learning, but the memorization of dates, facts, speeches, and pre-
vailing philosophies that perpetuate words of content without teaching
ideas. Education churns out automatons, and he is determined to teach
his children beyond the reflexive reproduction of old ideas.
234 Kate Schnur
Wendell’s devotion to saving his children from the tyranny of the
American education system, his own separatist and anarchist ideals, and
his polygamist family life and promiscuous sexuality all echo the belief
and practices of Djuna Barnes’s father. Because of the text’s obvious bi-
ographical ties to her family, there has been a clear trend in the critical
conversation about Barnes’s works since her academic revival in the ‘70s
and ‘80s.7 Much of the early critical discussions of Ryder have focused
on biographical readings of the text.8 Written in a highly experimen-
tal aesthetic based on a blend of Elizabethan syntax and vocabulary,
noncontinuous narratives, and generic instability, Ryder is dense, and a
biographical reading of it provides for a clear way to make sense of an
otherwise seemingly illegible and inaccessible text. These readings fur-
ther allow for necessary discussions of the role of Barnes’s sexual trauma
in shaping her approach to modernist fiction, allowing critics to theorize
the connection between such accounts of trauma and experimental high
modernist aesthetics.
More recent Barnes criticism, however, has attempted to move be-
yond the personal, biographical reading, mostly due to an effort to push
Barnes’s works into the broader modernist canon, such as it still exists.
In some of the most recent work on Barnes’s oeuvre, Julie Taylor and
Daniela Caseli each prioritize the role of trauma in the text, in order
to think through its relationship to literary history, not how Barnes re-
sponds to her personal trauma. Focusing on Ryder’s intertextual rela-
tionships with historical literary genres, particularly nineteenth-century
sentimentalism, Taylor argues that Barnes’s repetition of literary history
constructs a form of “literary witnessing” of trauma (77–79). Caseli re-
casts Ryder as an “anatomy of revenge” rather than a text maliciously
written to seek revenge of her own family (196). Thus, she begins to
work through the ties between Ryder’s experimental style and its con-
tent; it is a novel that “dissects” the canonical literature represented in
the text’s pastiche style, as well as the patriarchal family, in order to
expose the illegitimacy of both institutions.
From this overview of Ryder criticism, I want to highlight six trends
in the academic reception of this novel that are key to this analysis. (1)
The critics I cite above tend to open readings of Ryder with acknowledg-
ments of the difficulty of escaping Barnes’s biography, particularly due
to Barnes’s own distaste for anything as coherent as a biographical read-
ing of her texts. (2) The key way in which they have attempted to over-
come this difficulty is through reading Barnes’s experimental style as a
linchpin in her formulation of traumatic memory. (3) In drawing this
connection, both Taylor and Caseli suggest that the relationship between
trauma and narrative construction—i.e., storytelling—is at the heart of
Ryder. (4) Barnes’s experimental aesthetic and narration—embedded in
traumatic memory—rely upon language, exclamations, syntax, and im-
agery that references biblical, Elizabethan, and otherworldly places and
 The Doctor Treats the Ten-Breasted Monster 235
time periods. (5) This means that even though Barnes provides a named
location for the setting of the novel, her aesthetic creates a sense of place-
lessness and timelessness that makes the story of the Ryder family itself
seem mythic or fantastic. (6) Barnes’s experimental style relies on inter-
ruptions in the narrative to note fantastic elements such as the crying of
angels, the rapes of women in unspecified fields of wheat, or the story
of Beast Thingumbob. These interruptions further stress the reliance of
the text on moments of the fantastic to contribute to the impossibility of
narration that is a defining attribute of traumatic memory.
As a text undoubtedly devoted to trauma, Ryder shares this parallel
with trauma studies, a theoretical school notably devoted to storytell-
ing and narrative.9 Though trauma can disrupt the narratives that are
necessary to identity cohesion, narrative is also, as Amos Goldberg ar-
gues, where identity is “framed” and safely contained (123). But, within
trauma studies, the fairy tale functions differently for, as Donald Haase
argues, it carries a specific representational power. When recreation of
the “true” narrative of events is impossible or unattainable, fairy tales
provide both a landscape on which patients can map their memories and
a fantastic language through which sufferers, specifically children, can
narrate these experiences (“Children” 361).
In Ryder, however, storytelling and fantasy do not provide an escape
from sexual trauma and abuse, but work to convince children to accept
the societal parameters and rules that allow for this abuse to continue,
even in the realms of fantasy. Haase and Kenneth Kidd have both dis-
cussed how fairy tales can be representative of the cultures contempo-
raneous to the production of the texts. Whereas Haase describes fairy
tales as representative of the “psychological pathologies” of the societies
that produced them, Kidd demonstrates how children’s literature can
actively advocate for the political ideologies of their authors and the am-
bient discourse (Haase “Trauma” 991; Kidd 138). The fantastic mode
of narration allows Wendell to engage in this work, while still actively
combatting the traditional modes of education his children would have
met in school. Rather than teach Julie and Timothy ideas or lines to
memorize, Wendell provides a free-form fantasy of how his family ideals
would translate in the world of Thingumbob.
The fantastic is attractive to Wendell, not only because it is familiar to
children, but also because it reflects Wendell’s governing ideology: an an-
tiestablishment devotion to anything that deviates from social norms.10 In
his introduction to the story of Beast Thingumbob, ­Wendell makes sure
to include the following explanation in his description of T ­ hingumbob’s
lover: “[S]he was…terrible in her ways, which simply means that her
ways were not our ways” (119). In this moment, Wendell naturalizes the
unnatural. The supernatural, according to Wendell, is not all that super,
but is just that which exists outside of the frame of reference of those in-
doctrinated into the norm. The monsters indulge Wendell’s flight of fancy
236 Kate Schnur
but allow him to insist that what appears to be strange today can eventu-
ally become the norm—and, indeed, a better one. The only way to move
forward, however, is to look beyond the enemies of the “Jesus Mundane”
and the educational and philosophical paradigms they set in place.
Wendell’s story of the Beast Thingumbob is a not-at-all subtle indoc-
trination of his children into the heterosexual free-love and procreation-­
oriented family structure that he adopted and preaches. The fact that
Wendell describes the Beast Thingumbob’s lover as having a “not yet”
face and ten breasts essentially summates his vision of women as face-
less child bearers, whose bodies are perfectly designed for the number
of children they are meant to have. She also dies in childbirth, which,
as Wendell later explains to O’Connor, is an act that elevates a woman
to sainthood: “All women…are equal, until one dies in child-bed, then
she becomes as near to saints as my mind can conceive. Why is that?
you ask; because they died at the apex of their ability” (202). The story,
therefore, ends in the only happy ending that Wendell understands,
one that parallels what he believes to be the only appropriate end of a
­woman’s life.
It is also significant that Wendell makes clear that despite her old age,
The Cheerful’s sexual inexperience did not lead to any sexual frustration
or suffering until she wanted children, which her body conveniently co-
ordinates with the appearance of Thingumbob: “She had never thought
of the matter until it was timed to her necessity, and that was when the
love began to boil in the head of Thingumbob the Beast” (120). The
mutuality of the simultaneous rise of sexual desire in ­T hingumbob and
his lover is a translation of the romanticized concept of the mutual or-
gasm into terms that are strictly procreative. The Cheerful only exists
as a sexual agent for the length of time necessary for her to conceive
Thingumbob’s litter of children. Though Wendell’s philosophies of fam-
ily and society clearly rely on unrestricted sexual activity, the successful
extension of paternal lineage is still the primary focus of any romantic
tale. In an unsurprising ending, the lover dies even before her children
are born. The precise timing of her death leaves the lover a passive ves-
sel. Even the act of birth is denied her as Thingumbob is left in charge
of extracting his children from her body. Though motherhood is the
only goal available to women in Ryder, the conclusion of Wendell’s story
seems to question the extent to which women need fill this role. These
women are only passive pregnant bodies. After she does so, the father
can literally take his children from her and allow her to die. Even in the
realm of the supernatural, the narrative must ensure the continuation
of the patriarchal line, ultimately denying any possibility of matrilineal
continuance.
Wendell’s defense of the unnatural highlights his celebration of ways
that are unfamiliar to mainstream society. In the school of Wendell
Ryder, this story is a lesson, and in this lesson Wendell exposes the
 The Doctor Treats the Ten-Breasted Monster 237
dangerous flaws in his heroic stance against the truancy officer. By estab-
lishing himself as his children’s sole educator, Wendell makes a grab for
authoritarian control over the minds of his children, and he ensures their
indoctrination into the Ryder society. It forces his children to accept him
as their Jesus Mundane. While Timothy can embrace the uncertainty
of living in a world with unlimited sexual possibility, Julie is forced to
continue to face the limits of Wendell’s philosophy, to face her certain
end as an unwilling sexual object and mother.

“On Doctor’s Feet”: The Lessons of Dr. O’Connor

Dr. O’Connor’s entrance into any scene often introduces the conflicting
voice of reason to Wendell’s antics. When both the latter’s wife, A ­ melia,
and his long-term mistress, Kate, go into labor at the same time, and
Wendell attempts to deliver both babies on his own, it is O’Connor who
saves the laboring women. He “came on doctor’s feet. ‘Where are the
scissors?’ he said. ‘And I’ll need fine silken twine.’ Why was that? Julie
brought them. He was in the trouble now, sitting on the edge of the bed”
(96). O’Connor so exudes the authority and expertise of the certified
doctor, that his feet and his gait announce his status as medical pro-
fessional. He immediately begins demanding simple answers to simple
questions and issues orders to those in the house such that he makes
all those present answerable to him, despite Wendell’s own established
domain over his family and their bodies. Even the narrator cannot un-
derstand the methods of the expert and submits to his authority, asking
“Why was that?” Though the text does not understand his methods,
O’Connor saves the children and their mothers, thereby instilling the
text’s faith in his authority and abilities over Wendell’s inexplicable con-
fidence in his own amateur experimentation.
O’Connor’s science- and medicine-based knowledge of bodies again
helps him to assert his authority over Wendell. Wendell asks if he is the
father of Amelia’s newest child: “Do you believe in heredity?” O ­ ’Connor
pointedly responds, “I’d be an ass if I didn’t” (201). He does not bother
to engage Wendell with a rationale for his belief, only asserting the
flawed character of those who do not. O’Connor continues to explain
to Wendell how a new father’s inability to understand biology or how
to read the body causes the abuse of women characteristic to the Ryder
patriarchy: “God and father,” said the doctor,

that likeness is in all children, it is what produces trouble in families;

when there is more of God in the child than there is father, that gen-
tleman invariably accuses his wife of adultery, instead of faith, as he
should, and a great deal more becoming it would be, and a saver of
the peace of the home.
(201)
238 Kate Schnur
In O’Connor’s diagnosis, there is a mystic insistence on God’s ability
to impact the genetic dictations of a child’s face. The presumption of
the mother’s unfaithfulness that this possibility inspires, however, leads
to the domestic abuse that pervades this text. The paternity-obsessed
fathers of the Ryder society think that they themselves can determine
parentage from their own surface analysis of newborn features, thereby
subverting the established order of the authority of God and science.
O’Connor does not only function as a corrective force in medical
contexts, but in sexual ones as well. Coming across two of Wendell’s
children, Elsie and Hannel, O’Connor asks them what they intend to
be when they are adults. Hannel answers: “I shall get me a girl, and
beat her with a warming pan until she gives up the ghost, then I’ll settle
down” (161). Undoubtedly long under his father’s influence, Hannel’s
aspirations consist of settling down, but only after beating one woman
to death. The particular turn of phrase he uses to describe the ultimate
demise of this woman parallels the female passivity Wendell describes
in his story of Thingumbob. O’Connor’s response demonstrates a link
between medicine, the creation of sexual norms, and the regulation of
those who do not adhere to them: “I’m afraid you are a little unnatural,
Hannel, my son, you should never hit a woman” (161). Though, as read-
ers, we are certainly meant to agree with O’Connor in this exchange, we
can also see O’Connor employ the division between what is “natural”
and what is “unnatural,” echoing Wendell’s divisions constructed in the
story of Beast Thingumbob, in order to regulate the sexually and behav-
iorally deviant. That is, though Wendell’s and O’Connor’s ultimate goals
are diametrically opposed, the language and rhetoric they use is funda-
mentally the same. Even in his role as women’s protector, ­O’Connor mir-
rors the vocabulary of the man whose worldview depends upon sexual
violence and the theft of women’s agency.
Though the women of the novel love O’Connor, they will not rally
around his feminized masculinity. Noting O’Connor’s ultimate inabil-
ity to help the woman of Ryder, Ery Shin argues that the mythological
elements of the text suggest that “Dr. O’Connor exists as a crippled
­Tiresias unable to smite the Minotaur-like Wendell” (21). It would ap-
pear, however, that O’Connor cannot fail because this was never his
goal. O’Connor is not all that interested in offering women an alter-
native narrative beyond childbearing, which is perhaps not surprising,
given his profession. In the same conversation, he asks Elsie what she
shall do when she “grows up into a fine strapping woman, and [has] a
house…with curtains to every window, a new calico gown with tucks
all over it, and six eggs in the cupboard?” (161). Despite the supposed
draw of the domestic fantasy O’Connor describes, Elsie tells him that
she shall run away. And, though O’Connor may oppose the outright vio-
lence against women that is an inherent part of heterosexuality in Ryder,
the only response O’Connor can muster is a condescending “Shall you
 The Doctor Treats the Ten-Breasted Monster 239
now?” before he turns to Hannel. He may not advise her to stay at home,
but he does not encourage her escape, or even ask for further elabora-
tion. While he takes Hannel’s prediction of his future seriously, he all but
ignores Elsie. O’Connor only disengages, and finds more interest in the
provoking dreams of her abusive brother. This is hardly surprising, given
Wendell’s example. Even in fairy tales, death is the only way for women
to escape the abuse of their lovers. But, for Elsie, there are no women she
can look to for examples of how to successfully leave the Ryder family.
O’Connor may disagree with Wendell, but he will not encourage women
beyond the realm of empirical possibility. In these moments, O’Connor
defends a hypothetical woman against the threat of domestic physical
abuse. As a doctor, he also simultaneously establishes the medical pro-
fessional as the owners of knowledge of the female body and the regula-
tors of aberrant sexual acts and identities. There is a limit to his desire to
defy the already bounded rules of society.
Beneath the surface of the Ryder family history, we see the masculine
competition between Wendell and O’Connor over societal structure,
and particularly over the dominant ideologies that mediate interactions
between men and women. At the level of personal interactions, Barnes
localizes this competition to the educational authority over Ryder’s
children. At stake specifically are the fates of Julie, Elsie, and the other
girls of the text who learn from their fathers that death in childbirth is
an acceptable inevitability, and learn from their doctors nonetheless to
have families of their own. In the foil relationship between O’Connor
and Wendell, we see Barnes begin to problematize the easy dichotomies
we may want to draw between the danger of Wendell’s fantasies, and
the supposed safety of O’Connor’s scientific rationality. Barnes, how-
ever, does not allow us such a comfortable distinction. Wendell Ryder
is often the hand directly responsible for the suffering of the women in
the text, and yet is also an antiestablishment hero who recognizes the
freedom that comes from resisting institutionalized educational control.
­O’Connor, in contrast, identifies with the women in the text, is so pop-
ular among the women that one of his patients tells him that he might
as well be the father of her child, and therefore undercuts the problem-
atic hyper-masculinity that pervades the other male characters of Ryder.
And yet, he serves as a centralized power and representative for the in-
stitutions that are infamous for their participation in the subjugation of
women.

“Don’t Let a Man Touch You”: Julie as Reader

In this reading of Ryder, it is possible to lose track of Julie in the narra-
tive. It becomes difficult to make sense of her place in this competition,
and all too easy to read her as only a present and future victim of the
Ryder society, where we do not see the women of the text engage much
240 Kate Schnur
with this discursive and ideological struggle over the children. While
Amelia is in labor, we see one rare moment in which she chooses to ex-
plicitly lecture her daughter: “So take warning by my size and don’t let
a man touch you, for their touching never ends, and screaming oneself
into a mother is no pleasure in itself” (95). But, rather than take this
instruction, Julie instead uses this lesson as an inspiration for child’s
role-playing, pretending that she is a part of the labored calling for
­Wendell that she hears from both her mother and her father’s mistress:
“Over the fields and through the fine air he heard the voices of two
women screaming their children in, and through it the childish treble
of Julie, crying, ‘Wendell! Wendell!’ as she lay on her bed of playful
maternity” (95). Her childhood games and playacting suggest that Julie
properly engages with and performs the Ryder ideology. Though we may
understand that Amelia’s lesson has failed to impress Julie, we may also
read this moment as a form of experimentation, as Julie imagines—and
tries to understand through play and performance—the physical impact
of following her father’s lessons and the making of herself a constant
patient of Dr. O’Connor.
But, as she ages, Julie’s complaint at the end of Thingumbob’s
­story—“is that all?”—highlights her dissatisfaction with not only the
ending of Wendell’s story, but with the potential endings of her own
narrative as a young woman in this society, where rape is only another
kind of sex act and permissible, so long as it ends with conception. After
Wendell and his children return home from their fishing trip, Wendell’s
mother, Sophie, reads to her family, as she does every night. As Sophie
approaches the end of the story, Wendell urges his mother to stop read-
ing since Emily, the protagonist, would die in the book’s conclusion.
Wendell declares that he cannot bear the thought of a woman dying.
The reader is left to assume that this is only the case when women die
outside of childbirth.
Though Sophie listens to Wendell, Julie later returns to the story.
Alone in her bed, she seeks out Emily’s death scene:

Julie on her breast, she read the death scene by the light of a round
kerosene lamp, going word for word over the harrowing detail.
­Julie’s eye going over, too, but slowly, ‘and here,’ said Emily, ‘take
the need from me it is too heavy!’ and she closed her sweet violet
eyes and breathed no more.
(122)

It is unclear whether Julie finds comfort in the story’s sad end, or if she
also wonders at the end of this story if “that is all.” But, we do see Julie’s
search for different endings—not necessarily happy endings, but differ-
ent ones. We see that Julie interrogates Wendell’s power as narrative
arbiter. She questions the quality of the fairy tale he had spun earlier
 The Doctor Treats the Ten-Breasted Monster 241
and seeks out the endings he would never tell. In Julie, therefore, we see
the formation of fairy tales and cultural narratives through the push-
back from the children who listen, read, and play. Emily’s end is one in
which no doctor can save her—she begs for death—and in which her
death does not martyrize her as a saintly mother according to the worl-
dview of Wendell Ryder. Julie’s search is one for alternatives, especially
those that adults hid from her. Though a brief and private moment for
Julie, and one that is buried in the middle of a dense and illegible text,
this is a moment of resistance: a moment that begins to allow for new
endings, new narratives, and new storytellers.

Notes
1 I am indebted to Melissa Bobe, whose panel for NEMLA 2014, “Child
Abuse and the Supernatural,” inspired this essay. Many thanks to Jennifer
Mitchell for her invaluable feedback on this piece.
2 Later critics have also analyzed Wendell and O’Connor as characters op-
posed to each other. See Caseli, Chapter 5 and Shin, pp. 22–23.
3 According to Field, Mahoney even gave Barnes an abortion. This would
mean that the authority O’Connor provides in Ryder as the deliverer of ba-
bies comes into sharp contrast with the life of the man who inspired the
character, and even with later renditions of the character (Field 140–41).
Dr. O’Connor appears again in Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood. In
this later iteration, however, O’Connor has lost his license to practice, no
longer traditionally practices medicine, and though he holds a narrative au-
thority over the other characters of the text, this authority is tempered by the
ridicule he also invites from characters and critics.
4 Anne Dalton, for example, uses Ryder as evidence of Barnes’s own sexual
trauma, while Herring also frequently turns to scenes in Ryder when ac-
counting parallel moments in Barnes’s family history. Julie Taylor, however,
argues against such readings of both Ryder and Barnes’s later work (175).
She argues that biographical readings both defy Barnes’s own suspicion of
biography as well as her attempts to render subjectivity incoherent, and that
they pathologize Barnes trauma (5).
5 Wald Barnes recorded these beliefs in the pamphlet “Rescue the Race,”
which he destroyed so as to avoid getting arrested (Herring 32).
6 See Foust and Rogness for a specific discussion of how free love figures in
Emma Goldman’s writings on women’s agency and Koenig for a general
discussion of how free love circulated in the feminist writings of the radi-
cal left.
7 In addition to Wendell’s resemblance to Wald, Wendell’s mother S­ ophie
has often been read as a fictionalized form of Barnes’s grandmother,
­Zadel. ­Sophie’s influence on Julie echoes Barnes’s relationship with her
grandmother.
8 In particular, Dalton’s psychoanalytic reading of Ryder casts the text as,
at least in part, a reflection of the incestuous abuse Barnes suffered at the
hands of her father and, perhaps, her grandmother. She argues that Barnes
resists the Freudian model of incest, in which the daughter seduces the fa-
ther, to portray the father as the violator. For Dalton, the interruptions in
the traditional cohesiveness of the text are personally motivated, in order to
disrupt the patriarchal order that allowed for her abuse.
242 Kate Schnur
9 See Cathy Caruth’s field-defining work in Unclaimed Experience—­
particularly her first chapter—for a literary approach to forging these con-
nections and Allison Crawford’s work for a psychological study of traumatic
memory and narrative.
10 It is important to note, however, that despite this antiestablishment philos-
ophy, Wendell does cling to the notion that women should be mothers. His
devotion to deviation also clearly supersedes all concern for women’s agency
or safety.

Works Cited
Barnes, Djuna. Ryder. Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.
Capo, Beth Widmaier. “Can this Woman Be Saved?: Birth Control and Mar-
riage in Modern American Literature.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 34,
no. 1/2, 2004, pp. 28–41.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns
Hopkins Press, 1996.
Caseli, Daniela. Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus.
Ashgate, 2009.
Crawford, Allison. “If ‘The Body Keeps the Score’: Mapping the Body in Trauma
Narrative, Intervention, and Theory.” University of Toronto ­Quarterly, vol. 79,
no. 2, Spring 2010, pp. 702–719.
Dalton, Anne B. “Escaping from Eden: Djuna Barnes’ Revision of Psycho-
analytic Theory and Her Treatment of Father-Daughter Incest in Ryder.”
­Women’s Studies, vol. 22, 1993, pp. 163–179.
Field, Andrew. Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes. Becker & Warburg, 1983.
Foust, Christina R. and Kate Zittlow Rogness. “Beyond Rights and Virtues as
Foundation for Women’s Agency: Emma Goldman’s Rhetoric of Free Love.”
Western Journal of Communication, vol. 75, no. 2, 2011, pp. 148–167.
Goldberg, Amos. “Trauma, Narrative, and Two Forms of Death.” Literature
and Medicine, vol 25, no. 1, 2006, pp. 122–143.
Haase, Donald. “Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales.” The
Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 24, no. 3, 2000, pp. 360–377.
———. “Trauma and Therapy.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales
and Fairy Tales, edited by Donald Haase, vol. 3. Greenwood Press, 2008,
pp. 990–992.
Herring, Phillip. Djuna: The Life and Works of Djuna Barnes. Viking, 1995.
Kidd, Kenneth. “‘A’ is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the
Literature of Atrocity.” Children’s Literature, vol. 33, 2005, pp. 120–149.
Koenig, Brigitte. “Law and Disorder at Home: Free Love, Free Speech, and
the Search for an Anarchist Utopia.” Labor History, vol. 45, no. 2, 2004,
pp. 199–223.
Shin, Ery. “Djuna Barnes, History’s Elsewhere, and the Transgender.” Journal
of Modern Literature, vol. 37, no. 2, 2013–2014, pp. 20–41.
Taylor, Julie. Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism. Edinburgh UP, 2012.
Index
abortion see reproduction
Africa: and female mummies
121–131; inhabitants presented
as savage 69; see also colonialism/
imperialism/empire; mummies
animality/beastliness: and male
heterosexuality 204–205; in
feminized body 25, 86, 126–129,
185, 204–226, 227, 236; in
“primitives” 25, 69
asexuality see sexuality
athleticism in women xxv, 205,
209–215, 219–221
autoeroticism see sexuality
Bakhtin, Mikhail see menippean
carnivalesque/satire
Barnes, Djuna 228, 231, 234; Ryder
xiv, 185, 227–242
Baudrillard, Jean 30
bears: as avatars for lesbian relationship
and for pre-Revolutionary Russia
99–102
bicycle see technology
bisexuality see sexuality
Bowen, Elizabeth xxii, xxiii, 50, 52,
67–68; “The Shadowy Third” 85–95
Brooke-Rose, Christine xix
Browning, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett
Browning: on spiritualism 114–118
Burdekin, Katharine 118, 119; The
Burning Ring 167, 169–172; Proud
Man 167, 170–173, 176–179; The
Rebel Passion 167, 174–178
Carpenter, Edward 176–177
Carrington, Hereward xxxi, 37–38
childbirth see reproduction
clothing: and gender identity xxvii,
152, 154, 161–163, 176; as source of
power 122–123; jewelry 124–126;
rational dress movement 205, 211
Christie, Agatha: detective fiction xiv,
34–36; “Wireless” xiv, 3, 34–49
colonialism/imperialism/empire:
challenges to 118, 119–124, 132,
183; and fantastic genre xvii, xviii,
xxxi, xxxii, 6, 183; foreign objects
as haunted 51, 59–63; and New
Women 5; as oppressive 67, 69–75,
82, 88
communities: aesthetic/literary xvii,
100–103, 188; egalitarian 205,
219–220; queer xvii, 167, 175–178;
Russian émigré 100; women’s xvii, 78
contraception see reproduction
Corelli, Marie xxiii; self-image as
author 187–190; and suffrage 188;
The Sorrows of Satan xiv, 184,
186–198; Ziska: Or the Problem of
a Wicked Soul xiv, 119–132
demons/demonic: pact 18, 20; and
Russian revolutionary types 102,
104; Satanic feminism xiv, 186–187,
191–199, 220–222; and spirituality
55; as werewolves 217–220; as
women 27
dolls see uncanny
Doyle, Arthur Conan xxi, 36, 114,
119, 132n2, 186
Dreaming: dream-like reality 76, 94,
108, 220, 221–222; in menippean
satire 104, 107; in modernism xxx,
102; as productive of queerness
153, 158, 169, 171–176; and
supernatural communication 17–19,
57, 72; and time travel 172
Du Maurier, Daphne: “The Doll” xiii,
4, 22–32; Rebecca 23–25, 95
244 Index
Ellis, Havelock xxv, 66, 152, 156,
171, 216
empire see colonialism
evolution/Darwinism: and gender
discourse 183; and queer identity
170, 176–179; spiritual reaction
against xxix, 69; and time 129;
and Victorian psychology 66; and
werewolves 204
fairies xxxi, 69, 71, 97, 103–109; and
fairy fruit 67, 104–106, 108–109;
Fairyland 103–107, 108–109
fairytales/folklore 97; children’s
203–204; Irish 71, 76; Russian
98, 101–102; and trauma/abuse
229–230, 235, 239–241
female gaze 81, 126–129 see also
male gaze
femmes fatales 4, 192, 198, 205; and
haunted objects 50–63; as sexually
perverse/dominant 23, 25, 30,
122–132; as werewolves 209, 223
free love see sexuality
Freud, Sigmund 216; “Formulations
of the Two Principles of Mental
Functioning” 65–66; “The
Uncanny” xxxi, 87, 155, 184;
see also uncanny
gay male identity see sexuality
gaze see female gaze; male gaze
ghost stories xviii, 1, 10–11, 34–36,
38, 42, 95, 98; Gothic elements
13, 51–53, 69, 84; and imperialism
61–62; psychological xxii; and
space 68; and time 89; and women
5–8
ghosts xvii, 29–30, 204; in animal
form 69–70, 75; false appearance
of 34, 37–39; in houses 89–94;
as lovers 11–13, 18–19, 140;
and spiritualism 1–4, 41; and
supernatural insight 43; vengeful
56; and women 6–7; during and
after World War I xxxi
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins xxiii,
xxv, 84
gothic entrapment/enclosure 6,
85, 220
Grand, Sarah xxi, xxx, 5, 6, 7, 20
Haggard, H. Rider xiv; She 119–121,
128, 130–132, 183, 205
hair 210, 212, 227; body 158; black
57–59, 121–125; dyed 77; fur 219;
red 73, 108, 218; savage 24–25;
short 153
Hall, Radclyffe: “Miss Ogilvy Finds
Herself” xiv, 118, 152–160, 164;
The Well of Loneliness 152–153,
156, 180n9
Harrison, Jane 67, 107–108; The
Book of the Bear 101–102;
relationship with Hope Mirrlees
98–103, 109; politics 105–106;
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek
Religion 104; see also bears; Hope
Mirrlees
Home, Daniel Dunglas 113–115
homosexuality see sexuality
Houdini, Harry 38, 115
Housman, Clemence 137; and
suffrage 211; The Were-wolf 185,
203–215
Housman, Laurence: illustrations for
The Were-wolf 211, 213–214; and
suffrage 137, 211
hunting 72–76, 212–213
hysteria 4, 31–32; in men 9–10,
14–16, 20, 146–147
imperialism see colonialism
incest xxxi, 241n8
India: as source of occult knowledge
and objects 51, 59, 62–63;
inhabitants as savage 69
intoxication 80, 130, 219–220
intuition 3, 43–44, 46; in animals
69–71, 221
inversion see sexuality
Irish People/Ireland xxiii, 66–67,
69–82, 85
Jackson, Rosemary: Fantasy: The
Literature of Subversion xvii, xix, 7,
13, 90, 97, 107, 153, 207
jewelry see clothing
Kallas, Aino: The Wolf’s Bride
(Sudenmorsian) 185, 203–208,
215–224
Lawrence, Margery xiv, xxiv, 3–4,
50–63; “The Crystal Snuff-box” 50,
56–59; “The Haunted Saucepan” 3,
50, 54–56; “The Mask of Sacrifice”
51, 59–62

Lee, Vernon xiv; Hauntings 1–2; “Oke
of Okehurst” 2–3, 5, 10–16
lesbianism see sexuality
LGBTQIA+ identities see sexuality
madness xxxi, 52, 206; in men 13–15,
28; in women xxx, 191; see also
hysteria; menippean carnivalesque/
satire
male gaze 4, 24, 217–218; and
imperialism 61, 123; Lacanian 138;
and pictures 17; retaliation against
125; reversal of 28–29, 126–129;
see also female gaze
marriage 7–8, 15–20, 86–88, 91, 100,
137–138, 145, 148; destabilization
of 22–23, 119, 121, 190, 208–209;
polygamy 228; and queer time 154,
163; and reproduction 168–169;
and sexuality 217; supplanting
female relationships 81, 153
see also reproduction; sexuality
masculinity 66; female adoption of
185–198, 211–215; as feminized
43–44, 214, 228, 237–239;
impotent 16; objectified 28–30;
opposing models of 22, 129–130;
perceptual limits of 9–10, 13–15,
43–44, 46, 212–214; as Satanic
191–194, 199n12; threats to
119; toxic 212, 227–241; see also
demons/demonic; hysteria;
inversion; sexuality; World War I
medicine xviii, 6, 116, 237–238;
see also hysteria; psychoanalysis
menippean carnivalesque/satire 98–99,
101, 103–109
mesmerism xxi, 1, 113, 116, 129, 130;
see also occultism
Mirrlees, Hope 67; Lud-in-the-Mist
67, 97–109; relationship with
Jane Harrison 62, 98–103, 109;
relationship with the Remizovs
100–103, 109; Russian interests
100; see also bears; Jane Harrison;
menippean carnivalesque
modernism xvii, 34–35, 46, 67, 103;
gendered approaches to xxiii, 234;
high 97, 234; Sapphic xiv, 168,
171; supernatural xxii, xxx, 51–52,
116, 205
motherhood see reproduction
mummies xiv, xxxi, xxxii, 118,
119–132
Index 245
Nesbit, Edith xxiii, 7, 135–148;
children’s literature 135, 137,
148; “The Ebony Frame” 5,
16–20; “From the Dead” 136,
141–144; “Man-Size in Marble”
136, 144–147; “Uncle Abraham’s
Romance” 136, 139–141
New Woman xxiv–xxv; avatars
in ghost stories 5–20; as heroic
208–211; and horse riding 66, 75,
211; novels xiii, 187–188; parodic/
negative versions 77, 135–148; and
spirituality xxx
occultism xxi–xxii, 1, 3, 51, 69–70,
174; The Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn xxix; telepathy
32n2, 218–219; Theosophy xxix,
187, 198n2; see also mesmerism;
spiritualism
Oliphant, Margaret: “The Portrait”
xiv, 5, 8–10, 20
Ouida 5, 7, 20, 187
Parnell, Charles 66, 67, 73
polygamy see sexuality
portraits 7–20, 126–128, 140, 161
pregnancy see reproduction
promiscuity see sexuality
psychoanalysis xvii, xxxi–ii, 65, 146;
see also hysteria; Sigmund Freud
queer time xx, 129, 154–157, 160,
163–164, 168–170, 173, 179
queer identity see sexuality
Radcliffe, Ann xxi, 34, 138
radio see technology; see also uncanny
railroads see technology
rape 170, 232, 240
rational dress movement see clothing
reincarnation 11–12, 19, 125,
129–130
Remizov Alexei and Serafima Dovgell
101; literary work 101–103; toys
102; see also Hope Mirrlees
reproduction: abortion 228, 241;
childbirth and death related to
142, 185, 217, 222, 228–232,
236–240; contraception 222, 232;
motherhood 42, 136, 190, 205,
208– 211, 228, 232, 236; and
Darwin 177–179; pregnancy 91;
and queer time xx, 154–155, 163,
246 Index
167–179; and spiritualism xxx, 42;
see also marriage; sexuality
Russia see also communities; fairy
tales/folklore; Jane Harrison; Hope
Mirrlees; Alexei Remizov and
Serafima Dovgell
Satan/Satanic see demons/demonic;
see also masculinity
sexuality: asexuality 205, 209;
autoerotic/use of avatar 22–32;
bisexuality 152–165; female
sexual agency xx, 61–62, 81, 138,
195–196, 203–226; free love/
polygamy 205, 215–216, 231, 234;
inversion 152–165, 171, 175–179;
LGBTQIA+ identities xxiv, xxv
5, 67, 70; lesbianism xxv; 67–82;
97–109; 152–165, 168–175; 216;
gay male identity xx, 174–178;
New Women 5, 7, 20; promiscuity
in men 204, 230–234; promiscuity
in women xxx, 23; and spiritualism
xxx, 116–118; transgender/fluid
gender 10–16, 152–165, 206, 208,
210–211; virginity 24, 158–159,
227–232; see also communities,
femmes fatales; toys; uncanny;
World War I
socialism 5, 8–10, 20, 136, 137
Society for Psychical Research (SPR)
xxix, xxx, 1–2, 45, 114
Somerville, Edith and (Violet) Martin
Ross xiv; An Irish Cousin 70; The
Silver Fox 66, 69–83
spinsterhood xxv, 156, 190, 205, 209;
see also sexuality
spiritualism xxvii, 113, 187; as a
disease xxx; female mediums and
feminism xxix–xxxi, 4, 41; and
media 37; and psychical research
xviii, 45; séances 3, 36, 44, 114–118;
social reform xxix, xxxii; spirit
photography 3; WWI xxx–xxxi,
35; see also mesmerism; occultism;
sexuality
Stopes, Marie 216
Stoker, Bram 4, 119, 149n10, 205
suffrage: Edwardian activism xxiv–xxvi;
in literature xvii; opposition 135–137,
188; and sexual politics 203, 204,
208–209, 211
superstition xxxi, 57, 63, 70–75,
78–79, 82, 144
Swinburne, Algernon 210, 212
technology 3, 69; bicycle xxiv, 77,
211; photography xxxivn14,
3; radio 37–46; railroads 74;
telephone 35, 38, 69; see also
uncanny
telepathy see occultism
telephone see technology
Theosophy see occultism
time-travel xx, xxxi, 118, 167–180;
see also queer time; uncanny
Todorov, Tzvetan: The Fantastic: A
Structural Approach, xviii–xx, 207
toys 102; sex 31–32; stuffed 99,
101–102; see also bears
transgender/fluid gender see sexuality
trauma xxxi, 52–53, 63, 184, 230–235;
see also fairytales/folklore; incest;
rape; reproduction; sexuality
uncanny: dolls 4, 22, 28–31; foxes
70; literary effects xiv, xviii; media
34–46; perception 76; sexuality 4;
spaces xxxi; time 87, 92, 155; war
xxxi; see also Freud, Sigmund
vampires/vampirism xxxii, 4, 23, 25,
27, 30, 85–86, 204
virginity see sexuality
werewolves xxxi, xxxii, 27, 185,
203–226
Wilde, Oscar xxi, xxiv, 3, 66, 130, 190
witches 16–20, 36, 50, 56–59, 140; in
fox form 71–73; physical markers
217–219; symbolic of women’s
duplicity 26, 192; toy 102; see also
femmes fatales
Woolf, Virginia xxii, xxiii, xxxi,
51, 97; A Room of One’s Own
162; Orlando xiv, 118, 152–156,
160–164
World War I: and gender and
sexuality xxvi–xxviii, 22, 153, 67;
and homosexual/lesbian identity
xxvii, 67; and masculinity and
nationalism xxvii–iii; and women in
the workforce xxvi–xxvii, 153, 156;
see also spiritualism