Voicing the Queer Self: Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee

Abstract

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.