Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (review)

Catherine Maxwell’s informative and multi-genre study of post-Romanticism as evoked and encouraged by the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton, and Thomas Hardy considers complementary, sometimes deliberately borrowed “overlaps” in relation to Romanticism’s commitment to “the language of refinement, essence, and death, . . . of the supernatural, of hauntings, ghosts, shades, and phantoms which in some cases double for imaginative drives, impulses, and energies” (15). She argues that each of these authors enacts a “fusion” of “spiritual and material qualities” in order to communicate new relations between the seen and the unseen. Her discussion of how aesthetic images “stage” the “life-in-death and death-in-life of the objects they represent” is particularly astute (18). (An alternative title for Maxwell’s volume could have been Romancing Death.) Death’s imaginative provocations inspire some of the best work each of these six authors produced. One of the finest examples of Maxwell’s critical dexterity is her comparison of death, as Pater understands its aesthetic powers, with sculpture; she argues that death’s “subtraction of surplusage” shares with “sculpture the ability to refine away all the petty everyday accidentals, the superficial traits, habits, and acretions” of a life (99). Whether configured as an ancient deity exiled into human form for Pater, or a dreamwracking ghostly bride presuming upon the present for Hardy’s speaker, or the sounds in the very “fibres” of a violin conjured up in a Lee-Hamilton sonnet, the reality of visionary experiences or “spectral materiality” is everywhere confirmed throughout the texts this study analyzes (73).

Maxwell’s abiding interest in explicating “the sheer uncanniness and strangeness of many texts” via strong close readings is rewarding (3). Highlights of her analyses include the discussion of “magnetism” or mesmerism as it informs Rossetti’s poetry; Lee-Hamilton’s poetic responses to the Venus de Milo; and the function of synecdoche in Hardy’s poetry, which is “saturated in visionary Romanticism” (198). It is a particular pleasure to have Hardy’s poetry foregrounded in a study of late-Victorian literature. Maxwell astutely reveals how quotidian detail and observation lead to extraordinary insights in Hardy’s verse. Suggestively, she associates the sensations evoked in “Under the Waterfall” (1914) with Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance and his appreciation of that “delicious recoil from the flood of water” in the “Conclusion” (201). Second Sight is awkwardly punctuated, however, with fitful connections to psychoanalytic theories such as Sigmund Freud’s approach to narcissism and Melanie Klein’s analyses of children’s emotions. (D. W. Winnicott’s analysis of “the mother” is transmuted into “the motherland” of Hardy’s Wessex.) The discussion of “the fragment” in the canons of Lee and Lee-Hamilton would have been better served by consulting The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (2001), by feminist art historian Linda Nochlin.

Maxwell usefully—if intermittently—explores literary, intertextual, and personal connections among the authors. Fundamentally, however, this is a collection of essays rather than a carefully wrought or inwoven monograph. Although each chapter adds new strands to the unfolding argument, some threads are worked more tautly than others. Clarity is certainly achieved by devoting a chapter to each author (only Lee and Lee-Hamilton share a segment), but organizing the discussion according to its problematics would have resulted in a more truly comparative analysis. The extremely interesting work on architectural motifs and “ghost space” in Hardy’s poetry, in chapter 5, could have benefitted from a comparison with Pater’s notion of the “House Beautiful” and his haunting “imaginary portrait,” “The Child in the House” (1878). The reader will not learn how Maxwell would connect Pater’s admiration for Michelangelo’s unfinished statues with the “Romantic cult of the suggestive fragment” and “incompletion” (141, 145) as embodied in Lee’s texts.

Maxwell’s scholarship is generally excellent, with cogent...