The Victorian Supernatural (review)

The editors of this collection invoke the Victorian supernatural as an epistemological supercategory:

[These] essays look at the supernatural and its metaphors with reference to art, literature and science and show how, for example, thinking about the class system and gender relations, the nature of mind, the bond between the imperial centre and its far-flung margins, the expression of sexual desire and the operation of the housing market were shot through with the language of the supernatural.

(2)

Little wonder, in such a sentence, that a noun should lose sight of its verb. And little wonder, in such a book, that the subject matter should sometimes lose sight of its object. Generous to a fault, Bown, Burdett, and Thurschwell encompass in their wide editorial embrace not just the usual suspects—"telepathy, ghosts, Spiritualism"—but also "maybe-supernatural phenomena" such as "second sight, dreams, reincarnation and the divine aspect of Christ" (2). The result is a ghost-mongering miscellany, an assemblage of essays that never exceeds the sum of its parts.

The volume's lack of a unifying vision is evident already in its table of contents, where headings such as "Invisible Women" and "Raising the Dead" yoke together pairs of essays that otherwise have little in common. The introduction, likewise, betrays the fractured authorship of the book's editorial triumvirate. Starting off with a lively discussion of Victorian views on the supernatural, gathering momentum with a survey of supernatural tropes in recent literary criticism and theory, the essay lurches to a graceless halt with eleven disconnected paragraphs that read for all the world like eleven separate paper abstracts. Even Steven Connor's "Afterword" turns out to be yet another academic article in disguise, rather than the synthesizing conclusion one might hope for. Connor's topic—the geometry of the supernatural—is fascinating, his exposition brilliant; but why has his essay been pinned to the back end of the book like Eeyore's tail, an expendable afterthought?

Each of the volume's essays is well presented and finely tuned; yet one longs for the stroke of a bow that might draw from these separate strings a resonant melody. Among the more persuasive essays in the collection are those that, like Nicola Bown's on the visualization of dreams or Roger Luckhurst's on magical thinking at the imperial margin, invoke specific literary or visual artifacts in the service of broader arguments about Victorian intellectual and cultural history. Not coincidentally, Bown and Luckhurst figure among the mere handful of contributors who have published major academic works on the Victorian supernatural; their essays display a thorough knowledge of the relevant scholarly literature and a nuanced understanding of the theoretical issues at stake. Several other contributors, by contrast, betray their status as newcomers to a field that has already been well traversed by many recent scholars, a striking number of whom—Daniel Cottom, Ann Braude, and Diana Basham come immediately to mind—receive no mention here. Academic articles, of course, carry a diminished weight of research expectation when compared to full-length monographs. And who among us has never experienced the awful vertigo of discovering, the day after an important article has gone to press, an essential reference that we somehow overlooked? All the same, the lacunae in this book's bibliography point to the difficulty of keeping up with the scholarly Joneses outside of one's own field of academic expertise. When so many of a volume's contributors are early-career scholars addressing a given topic for the first time, no coherent critical conversation is likely to occur, and the result is a collection that never quite gels.

"We cannot fully specify the shape of the Victorian supernatural," notes Steven Connor, "because it is not an inert and finished shape in space, but a continuing potential for reshaping of the space it is in" (274). Research scholarship aspires to be the structured yet flexible vessel that contains such endlessly malleable Play-Do. But here, all too often, the "continuing...