Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past, and: Victorian Vogue: British Novels on Screen (review)

The recently recognized neo-Victorian genre—fiction written since about 1970 and set in the Victorian period—tends to generate the critical comment that the desire for the nineteenth-century past is an ambivalent one. This observation is made often by essays included in Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past, some of which dissent from the seeming confidence of the subtitle by noting that the past eludes complete possession. They detect this historical sensitivity in producers and consumers of neo-Victorian fiction, too: although readers wish to lose themselves in an absorptive experience of the Victorian past, writers help attune them to its discursive construction in the present. Mark Llewellyn makes an elegant version of this claim in his essay on novels by John Harwood, Charles Palliser, Jem Poster, and Sarah Waters. He remarks that neo-Victorian writers have begun to realize "that their publications are the equivalent now of the séances and communications with the dead then" (42). Llewellyn's analogy construes the neo-Victorian novel and Victorian séance as indeterminate mixtures of faith and knowledge, lending dignity to Victorian spiritualists and contemporary readers alike. As with a specter, the past can only be glimpsed from the present. That is the common theme running through the essays; its critical simplicity—the sign of a new field defining its boundaries—is often refreshing.

The more interesting parts of Llewelyn's essay, and of the volume as a whole, nonetheless, deliver critical insights beyond restatements of the field's founding problematic. Although the collection is subdivided into four sections of two essays each, "Histories and Hauntings," "Spectral Women," "Sensing the Past," and "Ghosts in the City," the essays speak to each other across these categories. I particularly admire Silvana Collela's essay on "Olfactory Ghosts" in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), which links the history of smell to Faber's postrealist critique of "the deodorizing project of nineteenth-century civilization" (89). Rosario Arias takes up a similar theme in her readings of representations of river stink in Matthew Kneale's Sweet Thames (1992) and Clare Clark's The Great Stink (2005). With similar critical sophistication, Esther Saxey's contribution explains how Mary Reilly (1990) and Alias Grace (1996) both engage and frustrate readers' desire to liberate Victorian women from sexual oppression through their acts of reading. And in a complexly layered reading of Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Peter Ackroyd's Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), Patricia Pulham uses the myth of the Golem to analyze the novels' engagements with the Ripper and Ratcliffe Highway murders, as well as their connection to the Jewish history of the East End. All of the essays give fine close readings of novels, so the collection would admirably service an undergraduate course on neo-Victorian fiction.

And yet the concept-metaphor of "haunting and spectrality" also tends to limit the book's critical scope, hampering some specific analyses of readers' demands for neo-Victorian fiction and precluding a generalized explanation of its recent enlarged appeal. By occasionally leading essayists to emphasize the elusiveness of the past, and to assume a compulsion to apprehend it, the haunting metaphor rhetorically conjures present-day writers, readers, and critics as an undifferentiated "we" whose Victorian desire is largely the same. If neo-Victorian fiction insidiously deploys the trope of haunting to achieve this illusion of cultural homogeneity, critics should focus on explaining why rather than rein-scribing that ideological effect. Otherwise, in the absence of more specific critical discussion, the haunted seem to have no particular racial, postcolonial, neoliberal, or other identifications and investments that...