Abstract
Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999) and Michèle Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen (1990) represent a radicalised historical fiction, encompassing fragmented multivoicedness and signifying the postmodern experimentalism of Neo-Victorianism. Both narratives are correlated with the traumas of patriarchy (the ghost, sexual abuse, mental illness) and bear witness to what Kohlke and Gutleben have characterized as ‘fill[ing] a lacuna rather than seiz[ing] an already occupied space of enunciation’ (2010, 7).
Through the correlation of literary form and content, this chapter addresses how each text explores the contemporary moment for women writers, alongside the historical act of women’s displacement from literary history. History, form and genre are thus not only foregrounded but utilised as modes of being and saying differently: the Neo-Victorian genre enables this saying differently, at the same time as providing vicarious readerly engagement in that other world. This doubled readerly position exposes the ‘lacuna’ as a space for innovation, speech, identity and otherness. As such, aesthetics are political.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
All references are to Roberts (1999).
- 3.
See Kontou, Spritiualism and Women’s Writing (2009), especially Chapter 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Cooney (2014, 39) suggests that the ritual Hatshepsut would have undergone to become ‘God’s Wife of Amen’, a revered and ceremonial role, will have been invested with a thinly veiled sexuality, viewed as sacred by the ancient Egyptians.
- 6.
See Kontou (2009, 104) on the word ‘forme’: ‘The printmaking “forme” quite literally, secures words—it prevents them from falling apart, from being forgotten or destroyed.’
- 7.
All references to this novel will are to Waters (1999).
- 8.
- 9.
As a point of reference here, Anne Lister’s diaries frequently use the word ‘kiss’ as a reference to orgasm, which maps onto her use of ‘crypthand’ or cipher to disguise her sexual adventures (Lister 2010).
- 10.
For a discussion of the links between this theory and Affinity, see O’Callaghan, 58 and Kontou, 188.
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Nally, C. (2021). Neo-Victorian Experimental Narrative: Writing the Absent Objects of History in Affinity and In the Red Kitchen. In: Aughterson, K., Philips, D. (eds) Women Writers and Experimental Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49651-7_9
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