Historical ghosts

A commonplace of nineteenth-century theories of historical fiction is that, at its best, the historical novel allows the reader to see the past, even momentarily experience it; the author may supply an authentic historical "picture," which the reader may contemplate from a safe temporal distance, or actually provide a narrative colored with such vivid detail that the reader finds herself entirely absorbed into it.  While reading some of Vernon Lee's ghost stories this afternoon, it struck me that her supernatural tales--and, indeed, many other Victorian ghost stories--take this commonplace to its logical, nightmarish extreme.  There's nothing original about noting the influence of Gothic and supernatural tales on the historical novel [1]; I'm wondering, rather, about the historical novel's influence on supernatural fiction.

All four of the tales in Lee's Hauntings (1890) suggest that any form of historical thinking--whether it takes the shape of academic research or simply listening to oral tradition--threatens to rupture the very delicate boundary separating past and present.  Never mind history repeating itself as farce; in Lee's tales, history repeats itself as sexual nightmare.  Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham note in the preface to their edition of Hauntings that Lee is "always conscious of the hidden accretions or layers of history that have built up around a particular locale" (14), but in the tales, such consciousness is always associated with erotic desire.  In "Amour Dure," a historian becomes obsessed with a legendary Italian murderess; in "Dionea," an antiquarian's study of pagan mythology begins to overlap uncomfortably with the title character's bizarre effect on those around her; in "Oke of Okehurst," a woman identifies so profoundly with her ancestress that she acquires that woman's ghostly (and murdered) lover; and in "A Wicked Voice," a musician makes the mistake of poking fun at an eighteenth-century castrato, only to become desperately enamored of the singer's voice.   Working in the archives, fiddling with old manuscripts, listening to family lore: all of these activities lead the researcher to yearn for the past, to invest it with a maddening charge that, in turn, explodes violently into the present.  In this moment when the past comes to life--fulfilling, in effect, the historical novelist's fantasy--the possessed man's or woman's present caves in upon itself.  As the historian of "Amour Dure" proclaims, "Those pedants say that the dead are dead, the past is past.  For them, yes; but why for me?--why for a man who loves, who is consumed with the love of a woman?--a woman who, indeed--yes, let me finish the sentence.  Why should there not be ghosts to such as can see them? Why should she not return to the earth, if she knows that it contains a man who thinks of, desires, only her?" (69)  "Consumed," of course, is the operative term; the historian's longing for Medea, the ghost in question, effectively eats him alive from within.  A passion for the dead leads to a remarkably ironic twist on publish-or-perish: such lust for the past generates not text, but sterility, in the very final form of the historian's own death.  Even the musician, who is still alive at the end of his story, discovers that his compositions have been shunted off in directions that only further his own torture.  It might be safer, after all, to stick with the present day. 

[1] E.g., Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel : The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Robert P. Irvine, Enlightenment And Romance: Gender And Agency In Smollett And Scott (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); James Watt, Contesting the Gothic : Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

Thanks for spurring me to buy the book. I'm about halfway through "Dionea" now. And am I crazy, or is Lee positively winking at us, flaunting the artificiality of these exercises? The "local color", for example, is very well done (quite enjoyable on that level for someone who knows Italy a bit), but she seems to have wanted us to watch it, as an act of assembly from known materials....