Apparitions Can Be Deceptive: Vernon Lee’s Androgynous Spectres

Abstract

What might be thought of as the dominant tradition of nineteenthcentury criticism in art and literature is a tradition which takes ‘seeing clearly’ as its prime metaphor and method for the achievement of the critical objectivity which is its declared ideal. For Ruskin, ‘the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. ... To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one’ (Ruskin 1983, 15). And more famously, for Matthew Arnold, the function of criticism was ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’ (Arnold 1970, 130); the artist should ‘see life steadily and see it whole’ (Arnold 1972, 149), and he should pursue ‘sweetness and light’ (1994). What poet and critic should try to achieve is a ‘total impression’, not ‘detached expressions ... [or] a shower of isolated thoughts and images’ (Arnold 1972, 32–3). This reliance on ‘seeing’ speaks of a faith in sense impressions, that what is perceived by the senses, primarily by sight, is what is actually there. The solidity and reliability of the real world is guaranteed by sense impressions, and in the arts, especially narrative and pictorial arts, there is the belief that seeing is knowing. This tendency in criticism is intimately related to realist modes of representation.

... this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.

Sigmund Freud, 1990, 363–4

When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male or female?’ and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty. ... Science next tells you something that ... is probably calculated to confuse your feelings. It draws your attention to the fact that portions of the male sexual apparatus also appear in women’s bodies ... and vice versa in the alternative case ... an individual is not a man or a woman, but always both. ... you ... must conclude that what constitutes masculinity or femininity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot lay hold of.

Sigmund Freud, 1986, 413–14

The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess; a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable, and reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. ... Transgression ... is not related to the limit as black to white, as the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of the building to its closed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no infraction can exhaust.

Michel Foucault, 1977, 34–5