Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales

Patricia Pulham's powerful and evocative interdisciplinary study of Vernon Lee's supernatural fiction is to be commended for its finely tuned reappraisal of the way in which psychoanalytic models can be used to elicit alternative sexualities and subjectivities from Lee's uncanny tales of ghostly seductions and sinister objets d'art. In particular, D. W. Winnicott's work on the "play instinct" in which toys function as "transitional objects" that allow the child to distinguish between itself and its mother has suggested itself to Pulham as a means of understanding the formative and insistent presence of art objects (specifically statues, dolls, portraits and, somewhat unexpectedly, castrati) in Lee's supernatural tales. She explains that, for Lee, the supernatural takes the "form of 'potential space' in which she plays with cultural objects" and, given "the predominance of the 'Past' in Lee's works," the application of the "play instinct" theory "suggests not only an historical past, but also a psychic past that is grounded in childhood, and those art objects which inhabit the past become 'transitional objects' or 'toys.'" In addition to these psychoanalytic readings, Pulham also draws insightfully on fields such as mythology, sexology and religion, in both their twentieth- and twenty-first-century emanations, to help her reader navigate Lee's richly associative imagination and her formidable scholarly intelligence.

Invariably, the subject's (putative) lesbianism requires nuanced and subtle investigation on the part of the modern critic, something which Pulham's deft readings of both the well-known tales of the 1890 Hauntings collection and lesser-known stories such as "St Eudaemon and his Orange Tree" (1904) undoubtedly achieve. Moreover, Lee's own distinctions between the equanimity of Apollonian art and the states of psychological disturbance induced by Dionysian art forms such as Wagnerian opera are also applied usefully by Pulham to understand the differences between the critical "masculine" intelligence at work in her nonfiction writing and the freedom from social and professional constraints that the writing of supernatural fiction allowed her.

The monograph is divided into four chapters, with each chapter exploring how the presence of one of the aforementioned "transitional objects" directs the fraught fictional encounters dramatised in these stories. In the first chapter ("Castrato Cries and Wicked Voices"), Pulham weaves with impressive dexterity feminist theory from Cixous, Iragaray and Kristeva on questions such as pre-Oedipal subjectivity to cultural histories of the castrato and attendant considerations of the sexual semiotics of this type of singing voice. Such discussions form a suggestive backdrop to her readings of "castrato" tales such as "Winthrop's Adventure" (1881) which convey both the vertiginous and visceral responses that Lee's overwrought and neurotic protagonists experience. In her reading of links between Lee's "A Wicked Voice" (1887, 1890) and Balzac's "Sarrasine" (1830), Pulham also sheds new light on the way in which the castrato voice, simultaneously that of man, woman and child, might function as an unconscious figure of "lesbian empowerment." While her evocation of the castrations, vagina dentate and "hermaphroditic phallicism" that she suggests figure in Lee's unconscious might send the more sensitive reader off in search of Apollonian ease, the study's evenhanded critical response to the psychological and physiological aspects to these "haunting[s]" assures that the monograph never descends into a mere catalogue of the macabre.

Pulham opens the second chapter ("A White and Ice-Cold World") by considering Lee's indubitable interest in the sculptural form in both her fiction and nonfiction writing and suggests that "The sculpture, then, like the doll, engages the spectator simultaneously in a regressive fantasy of interaction and a destructive process of alienation." However, her contention that "Sculptural beauty, for Lee, apparently induces a form of 'anaesthesia,' a paralysis which recalls that induced by a castrato cry" might require some reconsideration in light of the invigorating physiological experiences which Lee, in her contemporaneous and long-standing research into "psychological aesthetics," was to accord the act of viewing classical sculpture. Nonetheless, the readings of tales such as "Marsyas in...