Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales (review)

Vernon Lee (b. 1856-d. 1935) has currently given rise to an amazing output of scholarly papers, books, and international conferences (London 2003, Florence 2005), especially if we consider that, until the 1990s she was rarely read, and, with the exception of Mario Praz's essays and Peter Gunn's biography, little studied. Since she is such an exquisite "cult" writer and her production ranges from the short story, to the novel, to seven enchanting books on travel writing (dealing with Italy, France, and Germany), to a biography of the Countess of Albany, and to essays on aesthetics, literature, and musical theory, there is really still a great deal to research and discover.

In this book, Patricia Pullham offers a close reading of Vernon Lee's supernatural tales applying a variety of methodological grids, from biographical/psychoanalytical to gender studies to semantic/semiotic approaches. She favours, though, the psychoanalytical approach informed by Donald Woods Winnicott (1896-1971), the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, who, inspired by the work of Melanie Klein, theorized that only an exclusive relationship with a very caring mother will make the child, who is initially dependent on her, totally free to lead his/her own life. To achieve this freedom, the child is gradually lead by his/her mother to invest objects with symbolical significance. Winnicott calls these "mother substitutes" "transitional objects."

Pulham, whose knowledge of Lee's writings is extensive, has noticed how the tales strike the reader for their "aesthetic properties" and how the writer herself establishes a comparison between the art object and the childhood toy, which, she concludes, "resonates interestingly with Donald Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory of the 'transitional object'"(p. xvi). Pullham then goes on to identify the key art objects with the voice, the statue, the doll, and the portrait because of their recurrence in the writer's biographical experience, melded and transformed into her tales. The body of research—the ensuing four central chapters of her book—is devoted to a close analysis that attempts to demonstrate how Lee's supernatural tales develop starting from the "transitional objects."

In chapter one, "Castrato Cries and Wicked Voices," Pulham analyzes how the voice functions in "A Culture Ghost, or Winthrop's Adventure," "A Wicked Voice," and Lee's only play, Ariadne in Mantua. She reaches the conclusion that the "castrato is also the artist's mirror image, a figure of formidable vocal power that emasculates and disempowers the masculine" (p. 25), but when she suggests that we should also read the role of Diego/Magdalen in Ariadne in Mantua as a "castrato" and that the tragedy also stages the "demise" of the castrato, she seems to be forcing her point. In Mantua, at the court of Guglielmo Gonzaga, the castrati flourished and were revered for the entertainment they provided, and Lee, who chose the setting with a deep historical knowledge of the city's history, clearly wants Diego/Magdalen to be understood as a tragic counterpart to Shakespeare's Viola/Cesario: not a "castrato" but an ambiguous, fascinating personality that Duke Ferdinand, as we realize at the end of the play, had immediately recognized as his former lover.

More interesting and more convincingly discussed is the role of the statue in the second chapter, "A White and Ice-Cold World," in which Pullham analyzes "Marsyas in Flanders," "St. Eudaemon and His Orange Tree," and "The Featureless Wisdom," all stories that deal with statues (pagan artifacts in the first two tales that disrupt a Christian community and a saint and a featureless effigy of Athena in the third story) that are described by Lee in musical terms. In her in-depth reading of the stories of Marsyas and St. Eudaemon, Pulham displays a veritable firework explosion in her discussion that relies on a vast array of methods—from the pietist writings of Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the literary iconology of Theodore Ziolkowski, and similar literary topoi found in stories written by Lee's...