Empathy and Identity in Vernon Lee's Hauntings

In 1913, novelist, literary critic, and aesthetic theorist Vernon Lee coined the term "empathy" ("Empathy" 62); twenty-three years earlier, in 1890, she had published a collection of four short stories entitled Hauntings that, I will argue, anticipates this notion. Both Lee's fiction and her aesthetic theory advocate a kind of knowledge that dissolves two interrelated sets of boundaries: those between past and present and those between individuals. In the process, the stories call into question both the idea that history is progressive and the notion of a unified or singular subjectivity.

Investigating what it means to understand another person, Lee's stories develop the menace implicit in Victorian fiction's arguments for empathetic understanding. It is not her insistence on the need to attend to others that is remarkable, but rather her claim that such attention is inherently dangerous. Breaking with the mid-Victorian novel's focus on the potential of sympathetic imagination to connect people, Lee's stories emphasize the cataclysmic consequences for subjectivity that ensue when one person seeks to know another.

Each of the four stories in Hauntings is narrated by a male speaker; two take the form of journals, one is epistolary, and the fourth is told to an auditor whose voice is never heard. All of the narrators are writers or artists, and each produces his story (that is, the story we are reading) at the same time as he is trying and failing to complete another work—a history of Italy, a study of the pagan gods, a portrait, and an opera. In these tales, both scholarly work and artistic endeavors position their practitioners as spectators of, rather than full participants in, the worlds they describe or observe.

The collection as a whole repeatedly stages a confrontation between lived experience and the ways in which scholars and artists attempt to understand that experience. Each tale follows a similar trajectory, figuring its narrator as an observer of life and then tracing the process by which his aesthetic or critical distance is dismantled as he becomes caught up in events from which he initially stands apart. Indeed, the narrators' ability to complete their stories, coupled with their inability to complete their other projects, signals their shift— more or less willingly and more or less wittingly, depending on the tale—from observer to actor in the dramas they relate.

As the narrators exchange the position of detached observer for that of engaged actor, they reflect on their own influence on the tales they tell. "Am I turning novelist instead of historian?" one writer wonders ("Amour Dure" 22). This shift from chronicling the past to inventing it is one way that Lee's stories show their protagonists moving away from the distanced, objective approach that they initially take to their topics. Together, the stories suggest that one must be both a novelist and a historian to touch the past, and that the price of the empathetic identification that allows one to understand history is a loss of self that leads to death or compromised autonomy; understanding another means losing oneself.

In an essay published in 1923 titled "On Literary Construction," Lee would return to the question of how one's subjectivity may be reorganized by an encounter with another. Writing about what it means to create fiction, she speaks of "the extraordinary phenomenon of a creature being apparently invaded from within by the personality of another creature, of another creature to all intents and purposes imaginary" (22). The stories in Hauntings all involve such invasions, which give the collection its title. In one story, a painter is fascinated by a woman who assiduously cultivates her uncanny resemblance to an ancestor and believes herself to be reenacting an affair with the ghost of her predecessor's lover. In another, a nineteenth-century composer who scorns eighteenth-century music finds himself haunted by a famous tenor from the previous century who ultimately renders him unable to compose any music that isn't influenced by that era. One character welcomes her haunting while the other fiercely resists it, but the notion of being "invaded from...