Bewilderments of Vision: Hallucination and Literature, 1880–1914 by Oliver Tearle (review)

Hallucinations furnish memorable moments in mid-nineteenth century literature. Cathy and Heathcliff suffer desperate gothic visions; an unearthly maternal voice advises Jane Eyre to flee temptation; Scrooge protests that Marley’s ghost is more gravy than grave. At the century’s end, hallucination becomes the special property of the fantastic, the mode that leaves readers undecided as to whether the narrative events are supernatural or merely imagined. In particular, it becomes the hallmark of the revived and expanded genre of the ghost story. This is the premise of Oliver Tearle’s book, and it is also where the fun begins: he has assembled an archive that ranges through Henry James’s engimatic paranormal-psychological puzzle, “The Friends of the Friends” (1896); Vernon Lee’s aesthetic gem, “A Wicked Voice” (1890); Arthur Machen’s mystical delight, The Hill of Dreams (1907); Robert Louis Stevenson’s shilling shocker, “Markheim” (1885); Oliver Onions’s creepy “The Beckoning Fair One” (1911); and the greatest, most esoteric Victorian oddity, Phantasms of the Living (1886)—Frank Gurney’s, Frederic W. H. Myers’s, and Frank Podmore’s massive compendium of hallucinations commissioned for the Society for Psychical Research. Tearle’s book suggests the ways in which the different fiction writers responded to the SPR’s fastidious investigations into hallucination before World War I, modernism, and Freudianism redefined such things as psychopathological symptoms, and made the Victorian ghost story forever quaint.

The book’s historical argument draws on Terry Castle’s classic essay, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie” (Critical Inquiry 15 [1987]), which demonstrates how that term shifted from an external projection at the end of the eighteenth century—a media technology used by rationalists to debunk belief in spirits—to an irrational, internal projection at the end of the nineteenth. Whereas Castle reads Enlightenment discourses on optics and apparitions through entertainment technology and psychology to reveal a shift in cultural history, Tearle’s study confines itself to literary close readings. For the most part, these explain how the stories’ language produces their overt meanings, rather than explaining the cultural work the tales performed. In keeping with these humble critical stakes, the theoretical touchstones are old familiar ones: Tzvetan Todorov’s classifications, Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny, and Northrop Frye’s musings on imaginative truth. This book could almost as easily have been published in 1973 as in 2013. Fair enough. Old-fashioned close reading can create dazzling new interpretations, and Tearle has chosen wonderful material upon which to practice this venerable art.

Take Vernon Lee’s “A Wicked Voice,” from Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (1890), which was edited by Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham for Broadview Press in 2006. It is an eminently queer story, about a Wagnerian composer who hallucinates the voice of an eighteenth-century castrato named Zaffirino until it drives him to erotic frenzy and madness. Tearle helpfully points out that Lee was writing against the SPR’s empirical investigation of ghosts, and in favor of their psychological symbolism; and he offers the interesting factoid that she coined the word empathy, in relation to telepathy, in 1904. But these observations do not cohere to produce a fresh interpretation of the story. Rather, the commentary surveys the story’s insect and moonbeam imagery, “the accumulation of mal words” such as malaria, Lee’s inconclusive correspondence with Stevenson, and other assorted topics (74). Intent on describing rather than analyzing the story, the chapter dwells in its atmosphere, making obvious points. When it brushes up against the complex topic of queer desire, it quickly backs away. “We cannot gloss over altogether the homoerotic elements to this story,” Tearle claims; but that is the effect of introducing the topic without developing it (80). Without providing the current critical conversation about the story, or developing a complex interpretation of the story’s evident ambiguities, Tearle’s minutely detailed close readings—in this...