Haunted Collections: Vernon Lee and Ethical Consumption

I believe that's the last bit of bric-à-brac I shall ever buy in my life (she said, closing the Renaissance casket)—that and the Chinese dessert set we have just been using. The passion seems to have left me utterly. And I think I can guess why. At the same time as the plates and the little coffer I bought a thing—I scarcely know whether I ought to call it a thing—which put me out of conceit with ferreting about among dead people's properties.

—Vernon Lee, "The Doll"

Vernon Lee's "The Doll" is the story of a collector's reformation. The thing (which perhaps should not be called a thing) that is responsible for putting the collector "out of conceit with ferreting about among dead people's properties" is a doll that once belonged to a widowed count. The count had spent hours each day holding this life-sized mannequin, which had been dressed in his wife's clothing and a wig fashioned from her hair. When the count died, the doll was cast into a closet. The collector encounters the doll while shopping for bric-a-brac and presses her curiosity dealer for its history. Indignant that this tragic object should be left to gather dust in a closet, she purchases the doll in order to burn it. Burning the doll cures her insatiable desire for bric-a-brac and puts "an end to [the doll's] sorrows."¹ The historical contextualization of this object has remedied the narrator's taste for collecting and has facilitated the liberation of an object from degradation and disregard. In this essay I read Lee's fiction as an ethical instruction manual for the modern consumer, as allegorical directions for the recontextualization or re-auraticization of objects. I argue that Lee formulates an ethical corrective to the subjectivism of modern consumer practices in her ghost stories. The heroes of these stories model a method of appreciation that acknowledges the historical otherness of the cultural relic and grants the object a separate and distinct identity, allowing it to exceed its utility as an indicator of taste. This praxis of ethical consumption is set up as an alternative to aggressive modes of consumption that threaten to absorb and assimilate difference. Again and again in Lee's short fiction, characters are awakened to the sanctity, the otherness, the separateness of objects, and these ethical awakenings are often the result of what I refer to as "historicized consumption."²

Lee's mode of historicized consumption is considered here in relation to the Victorian tradition of moral thinking about consumption from which it emerged. Recent work, by Peter Gurney, Deborah Cohen, Carolyn Lesjak, and Jennifer Wicke, for example, has complicated the story of the rise of mass consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by acknowledging countermovements, such as working-class cooperative culture or moral interior decorating, that attempted to moralize the market, or by examining the manner in which consumption and pleasure were reformulated in terms of their positive possibilities by Oscar Wilde or the members of the Bloomsbury Group.³ Reading Lee's praxis of historicized appreciation in relationship to the ongoing late-Victorian conversation concerning the politics of consumption in which Lee participated, this essay similarly argues not only that consumption has a history but also that consumption is not always necessarily opposed to history and ethics.⁴ During the latter half of the nineteenth century, aesthetes and economists exhibited a willingness to think through rather than against the transformations occurring in their culture, to accede to the overwhelming emphasis on consumption in the late-Victorian period while actively and pragmatically responding to the elision of history and ethics that accompanies modern consumerism.⁵ Ruskinian aesthetics, Paterian spectatorship of history, and the ethical strain in Alfred Marshall's neoclassical economic theory assist Lee as she reenvisions consumption as an act that "in expounding the beautiful things of the past, . . . [adds] to the beautiful things of the present."⁶ Lee's attempt to infuse consumer practices with a sense of morality and history serves here as...