Abstract
Katie Roiphe’s 2001 novel, Still She Haunts Me, examines Lewis Carroll’s posthumous trial for crimes ‘evidenced’ by his mysteriously censored diary and his penchant for photographing children in what he termed ‘their favourite state of nothing to wear’.2 The novel — a pastiche or kaleidoscope vision of Carrollania — mediates a debate generated by Victorian secrets and retrospective suspicions and uses diary form to consider how rumour and suspicion shape contemporary understanding of Lewis Carroll’s now mythical relationship with his ‘ideal child friend’, Alice Liddell.3 Roiphe’s imagined diary testifies for the prosecution and yet, paradoxically, also organises a mitigating plea for clemency and understanding. Ten embedded diary entries perform a type of narrative striptease, refracting popular elements of Carroll mythology to focus on flesh, voyeurism, and fetishism. Roiphe debates how contemporary commentators correlate photography — the ‘black art’ that produces ‘the shadow made flesh’ — with the mysteries surrounding Carroll’s mutilated or lost diaries.4 This chapter therefore considers how fictional diary form conspires with the historically skewed gaze of the camera lens to interrogate revisionist ideas that trouble and taint the reputation of an iconic Victorian writer.
Having and holding, till
I imprint her fast
On the void at last
As the sun does whom he will
By the calotypist’s skill.
Robert Browning ‘Mesmerism’1
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Notes
Robert Browning, ‘Mesmerism’, in Poems by Robert Browning (Ipswich: The Boydell Press, 1973), p. 201.
Morton N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 170.
Katie Roiphe, Still She Haunts Me (London: Review, 2001), pp. 9, 36. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.
Margaret Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 226.
Christian Gutleben discusses the ‘ontological confusion between invention and reality, fiction and history’ evident in A. S. Byatt’s Possession. Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p. 26.
Mark Llewellyn, ‘What is neo-Victorian Studies?’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1 (2008), 164–85 (168).
Lucie Armitt, ‘“Stranger and Stranger”: Alice and Dodgson in Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me’, Women: A Cultural Review, 15 (2004), 167–79 (p. 172; p. 169).
Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries (London: Pan Books, 1985), p. 247, original emphasis.
Anne Clark, Lewis Carroll: A Biography (London: J. M. Dent, 1979), p. 203.
Will Brooker, Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 191.
Karoline Leach, In the Shadow of The Dreamchild: A New Understanding of Lewis Carroll (London: Peter Owen, 1999), p. 59.
Katie Roiphe, Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century’s End (New York: Little, Brown: 1997).
Katie Roiphe, The Morning After: Sex, Tear and Feminism (New York: Little, Brown, 1993).
Charles Palliser, ‘Author’s Afterword’, The Quincunx: The Inheritance of John Huffam (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 1208.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 23.
Andrew Hassam, Writing and Reality: A Study of Modern British Diary Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), p. 18.
H. Porter Abbott, ‘Letters to the Self: The Cloistered Writer in Nonretrospective Fiction’, PMLA, 95 (1980), 23–41 (23).
H. Porter Abbott, Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 31.
Henry James, The Aspern Papers, in ‘The Aspern Papers’ and ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (London: Penguin Books, 1988), pp. 45–142 (p. 142; p. 125). The novella preface states that James ‘delight[ed] in a palpable imaginable visitable past’, p. 31, original emphasis. The story is ‘a final scene of the rich dim Shelley drama played out in the very theatre of our own “modernity”’, pp. 30–1.
Sarah Waters, Affinity (London: Virago, 2000), p. 348.
Melissa Pritchard, Selene of the Spirits (Princeton: The Ontario Review, 1998), p. 212.
Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 165.
A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Random House, 2005), p. 156.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 109.
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 7.
Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 4.
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 95.
James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 63.
Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘Sexsation and the neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction’, in Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance, ed. by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luise Orza (London: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 53–77(55), original emphasis.
Valerie Raoul, The French Fictional Journal (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 41.
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (London: Virago, 2006 [1996]), p. 25.
Morton N. Cohen, ‘Lewis Carroll: “Dishcoveries” — and More’, in Nineteenth-Century Lives, ed. by Laurence S. Lockridge, John Maynard, and Donald D. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 112–24 (115).
Carroll was a keen and renowned amateur photographer with little girls his favoured, but not exclusive, subject. See Douglas Robert Nickel, Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll (New Haven, CT: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Press, 2002).
Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 133.
Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 87.
Helen Groth, ‘Kaleidoscopic Vision and Literary Invention in an “Age of Things”: David Brewster, Don Juan, and “A Lady’s Kaleidoscope”’, ELH, 74 (2007), 217–37 (228–9).
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000 [1982]), p. 115, original emphases.
This photograph graces the covers of numerous critical works on Carroll, including Will Brooker’s text and Jennifer Green-Lewis’s Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (1996). It also shares a split frame with Carroll on the cover of Leach’s book. Green-Lewis includes the image in her list of twenty most popular Victorian photographs. Jennifer Green-Lewis, ‘At Home in the Nineteenth Century: Photography, Nostalgia and the Will to Authenticity’, in Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, pp. 29–48 (38).
Susan Barrett, Fixing Shadows (London: Review, 2005), p. 111. Helen Humphreys admits ‘loosely imagined renderings’ of Julia Margaret Cameron’s studio scenes. ‘Author’s note’, Afterimage (London: Bloomsbury 2001), no page number.
Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), p. 11.
Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 191.
A. S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 31.
Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 26.
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© 2013 Kym Brindle
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Brindle, K. (2013). Lewis Carroll and the Curious Theatre of Modernity: Epistolary Pursuit in Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me . In: Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007162_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007162_6
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