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

Pulham, Patricia

doi:10.4324/9781315262123

Cited by 8 publications

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“…Patricia Pulham claims that 'music and voice are intertwined in Lee's artistic formation'. 20 With specific reference to the role that listeners, as well as readers and beholders, can play in completing the work, Shafquat Towheed further explains that Lee's chief interest in musical aesthetics derived from the cross-fertilization of formalist criticism with the new psychology of the time. 21 Beyond the well-established parallel with the Hegelian aesthetic tradition handed down to her by Walter Paterwho claimed that all art aspires to the condition of music -in reality Lee did not hold that teleological view.…”

Section: Singing Portraits: Visual Memory and Resonancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…91 As Pulham writes, Zeffirino's voice 'symbolises a menacing femininity that remains sexually ambiguous'. 92 Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey Francesco Ventrella (1890), or Arlo Bates' A Problem in Portraiture (1889) show that the voice was a notable signifier of portraits' supernatural qualities in late-Victorian literature, but also of their queerness.…”

Section: Listening To Portraits With Vernon Leementioning

confidence: 99%

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Voicing the Queer Self: Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee

Ventrella¹

2023

Art History

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Originating in a critical examination of Vernon Lee's perceived ugliness and her excessive talking among her acquaintances, this essay situates historically a series of portraits in which she features as a sitter, subject of comment and commentator, to suggest that the interweaving of voices and faces can be useful to resist the elision of seeing and knowing on which art historians often base their understanding of gender and sexuality in portraiture. As an art critic, Lee maintained an ambivalent position with regard to portraits. Her familiarity with the new psychology informed a response whereby resonance could shift the sensorial boundaries of the genre beyond its function as likeness. By engaging with Lee's interrogation of the voice of portraits, both in art writing and fiction, the essay examines a series of queer attempts to challenge the authority of the look to identify, define or consume the subject of portraiture. As the late nineteenth century also saw the emergence of talking styles as audible articulations of the queer self, contemporary representations of Lee and her loquacity may be read as queer propositions at a time when dominant discourses around ‘female inversion’ and the ‘speaking woman’ were being fixed by sexologists.

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Section: Singing Portraits: Visual Memory and Resonancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Listening To Portraits With Vernon Leementioning

confidence: 99%

Voicing the Queer Self: Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee

Ventrella¹

2023

Art History

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“…It charts the relationship of an upper-class woman and a young archeologist as they investigate a parallel secret love affair of seventeenth-century counterparts. More significant for Lee's subsequent reputation are her shorter fictions and especially the supernatural tales that have been central to her recuperation as a creative writer (Pulham 2008). The first book collection, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (1890), contains four stories written during the 1880s.…”

Section: Britain 1880s: Aestheticismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lee, Vernon 1856–1935

Burdett¹

2020

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing

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Vernon Lee (b. Violet Paget, 1856-1935) was a prolific and diverse author, producing over 40 major works and numerous shorter pieces spanning historical studies of art and music, short stories and supernatural tales, novels, dramas, works on aesthetic theory, literary criticism, travel writing, meditations on houses and gardens, and pacifist polemic. Born to British parents, her early life was spent in Europe before eventually settling in Italy. A cosmopolitan from birth, speaking and writing in several European languages, she was an important part of late-nineteenth-century British aestheticism. From 1881 she spent time each year in Britain, her reputation early established by the well-received Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), published when she was just 24. Renowned as a brilliant talker and sought out for her intellectual power, associated with sexual dissidence and the avant-garde, she nevertheless unsettled elite artistic circles when she satirized aestheticism in her first novel, Miss Brown (1884). She contributed to the innovative field of "psychological aesthetics" and, after the turn of the century, intensified her interest in social, political, and philosophical topics. During the First World War, she was an outspoken pacifist, an unpopular position that contributed to her declining reputation. Largely lost to view during the twentieth century, the twenty-first has seen a resurgence of interest, and Vernon Lee studies is a now a vibrant area of scholarly debate that has also seeded innovative cultural activity.

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The Travelling Doll Wonder: Dickens, Secular Magic, and Bleak House

Pittard¹

2016

Studies in the Novel

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In summer 1849, a small group gathered at Winterbourne House at Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight to watch a conjuring show by "The Unparalleled Necromancer Rhia Rhama Rhoos," a magician apparently "educated cabalistically in the Orange Groves of Salamanca and the Ocean Caves of Alum Bay" (Forster 89-90). The show promises a number of amazing set pieces, all of them 'wonders': "The Leaping Card," "The Pyramid," "The Conflagration," "The Loaf of Bread," "The Pudding," and "The Travelling Doll" (Forster 90). The audience watch the conjuror as he makes two cards selected by the audience and replaced in the pack leap forth at his command; another card is selected, named by the conjuror, set on fire and then reproduced from the ashes; another audience member's card is locked in a box and then materialises in the middle of a freshly cut loaf of bread. It is unlikely that many in the audience would have known the means by which these effects are achieved; it is certain, however, that they knew the true identity of the unparalleled necromancer Rhia Rhama Rhoos, who was none other than Charles Dickens. In this article, I consider the connections between Dickens' fiction and the art of conjuring, what Simon During calls "secular magic" (1); that is, magic that makes no claim to the supernatural, as opposed to magic in its supernatural or anthropological guises. I consider Rhia Rhama Rhoos' routine 'The Travelling Doll Wonder,' as a paradigm for reading Dickens' fiction, and Bleak House in particular, arguing that Esther's doll, an uncanny subject/object which disappears and reappears at crucial points of the text, is informed by Dickens' own performance with a disappearing doll that raises similar questions of perception and subjectivity. My wider aim is to demonstrate that what John O. Jordan calls "the Bleak House effect"-that is, "the novel's way of luring its characters (and its readers) to imagine 2 things that might have been but never were or that exist only in their minds" (147)-can be understood in the context of a similarly hyper-phenomenological cultural practice with which Dickens engaged during the composition and publication of the novel; that is, secular magic. I argue that Dickens' interest in performance magic functions metacritically in his work, especially in Bleak House, and furthermore that while the enchantment of conjuring underpins the novel, Bleak House also draws attention to the traumatic component of secular magic. Although not traumatic in itself, the experience of conjuring resembles the (in Cathy Caruth's phrase) unclaimed experiences of trauma, and it is in Bleak House that Dickens explores the connection between these discourses. Dickens' interest in performance magic is well evidenced in his novels, letters, and performances. As John Forster records, he was a keen observer of such performances in both England and France; for instance, on 3rd May 1853 Dickens invited Frank Stone to accompany him to a performance given by the influential French conjuror Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin at Sadlers Well...

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

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Voicing the Queer Self: Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee

Voicing the Queer Self: Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee

Lee, Vernon 1856–1935

The Travelling Doll Wonder: Dickens, Secular Magic, and Bleak House

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