Greek Gift and “Given being”: The Libidinal Economies of Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales

Abstract

Nowhere in Vernon Lee's writing are objects more pernicious than when figured as gifts.Ostensibly benign acts of giving frequently emerge as baited offerings: offerings that have the potential to draw the recipient into a complex web of obligation, debt and depletion. In Lee's 1896 tale "Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady," three figures at court offer up an extravagant medley of gifts in order to secure the young Prince's patronage; through their beneficence, they believed, "Alberic [would] be turned to profit" (Lee 2006, 196). An earlier tale, "Lady Tal" (1892), describes how the eighteen year-old Lady Atalanta loses her aged husband within a year of their marriage; "Tal" is the beneficiary of her late husband's extensive wealth but is subject to a humiliating and punitive codicil (á la Edward Casaubon).Exposing a philosophy of giving that is honorific in nature and which tends towards the creation of obligatory attachments, the tales reveal Lee's mistrust of the practice of giftgiving; a mistrust which culminated in an attack on "making presents" in her 1904 work Hortus Vitae. Here, Lee's own "philosophy of presents" which laments the "specious air of […] disinterestedness" attached to the gift anticipates Marcel Mauss in his belief in a "polite fiction" that conceals "obligation and economic self-interest": the driving force of giftexchange (Lee 2008, 66; Mauss 2002, 4). This essay will argue that, in line with later theorists of the gift, Lee interpreted the circular or reciprocal structure of the gift-event as evidence of the activity's economic form.However, for Lee, the treachery of the gift exceeds the latent economy considered more recently in gift theory. 1 "Gift-giving" is a privileged form of symbolic activity in Lee's