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

Patricia Pulham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754650966
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351957106
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In her persuasively argued study, Patricia Pulham astutely combines psychoanalytic theory with socio-historical criticism to examine a selection of fantastic tales by the female aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935). Lee's own definition of the supernatural in the preface to Hauntings questions the nature of the 'genuine ghost', and argues that this figure is not found in the Society of Psychical Research but in our own psyches, where it functions as a mediator between past and present. Using D.W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts, Pulham argues that the prevalence of the past in Lee's tales signifies not only an historical but a psychic past. Thus the 'ghosts' that haunt Lee's supernatural fiction, as well as her aesthetic, psychological, and historical writings, held complex meanings for her that were fundamental to her intellectual development and allowed her to explore alternative identities that permit the expression of transgressive sexualities.

Chapter 1
Castrato Cries and Wicked Voices

O dream of poet passing every bound!
My thoughts have built a fancy of thy form,
Till it is molten into silver sound,
And boy and girl are one in cadence warm.

Théophile Gautier (1849)¹

In the opening chapter to a collection of essays entitled Belcaro (1881), Vernon Lee describes her sensations on completing her first published work, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880):

When, two summers since, I wrote the last pages of my first book, it was, in a way, as if I had been working out the plans of another dead individual. The myself who had, almost as a child, been insanely bewitched by the composers and singers, the mask actors and pedants, and fine ladies and fops, … this myself, thus smitten with the Italian 18th century, had already ceased to exist (1881, 3–4).

This eighteenth-century world, the subject of her literary debut, for which she had acquired a love ‘at an age … where some of us are still creatures of an unconscious play-instinct’ functioned as a ‘remote lumber-room full of discarded mysteries and of lurking ghosts, where a half-grown young prig might satisfy, in unsuspicious gravity mere childlike instincts of make-believe and romance’ (Lee 1907, xvi). For Lee, the child that played in this world had been replaced by ‘Another myself’: a more discerning and discursive self who saw ‘what the original collector had never guessed: illustrations, partial explanations’, and ‘questions of artistic genesis and evolution, of artistic right and wrong’ and ‘This new myself’, she writes, ‘is the myself by whom has been written this present book’ (1881, 4). The passage implies a system of development and individuation that is played out through Lee’s responses to Italian art and culture in the earlier text. Lee’s words suggest not only the discovery of the self, but an anxiety to present herself as a mature writer who has surfaced from the chrysalis of childhood fantasy and engaged in the adult language of philosophy and aesthetics. Yet, her other self, the ‘bewitched’ child, continues to haunt the pages of Belcaro.

In an essay entitled ‘The Child in the Vatican’, Lee invents what she calls ‘a fairy tale’ in which a young child becomes the toy of the ‘Statue-demons’ that line the palace corridors who determine ‘to cast a spell upon it which would make it theirs’ (1881, 24). The child continues to live its ordinary life, but slowly begins to experience some inexplicable changes when it sees a beautiful landscape or hears a stray bar of music: ‘little by little, into its everyday life, stole strange symptoms; sometimes there would come like a sudden stop, as of a boat caught in the rushes, a consciousness of immobility in the midst of swirling, flowing movement, a giddy brain-swimming feeling’ (1881, 26). Eventually the child becomes aware that it is no longer a child and realizes that it had been learning something which others did not know. This esoteric knowledge is conveyed through music:

For it heard one day a few pages of a symphony of Mozart’s; the first it had ever heard save much more modern music; and those bars of symphony were intelligible words, conveyed to the child a secret. And the secret was: ‘we are the brethern [sic], the sounding ones of the statues: and all we who are brethern [sic], whether in stone, or sound, or colour, or written word, shall to thee speak in such a way that thou recognise us, and distinguish us from others; and thou shalt love and believe only in us and those of our kin’ (Lee 1881, 27).

That the child in the Vatican is Lee herself, there is little doubt. In his biography of Vernon Lee, Peter Gunn quotes her description of an early visit to St Peter’s in Rome during which she is enthralled by ‘the quavering notes of singers’, the ‘shrill blasts of trumpets’ and the ‘white splendour of the pontifical robes and jewels’. Lee writes:

From that moment everything seemed changed … I was wild to be taken into those dark, damp little churches … full of long, sweet, tearful, almost infantine notes of voices, whose strange sweetness seemed to cut into your soul, only to pour into the wound some mysterious narcotic balm. I was wild to be taken to the chilly galleries … [where] all those gods, all those goddesses, and nymphs, and heroes, all that nude and white and ice-cold world seemed to seek me with their blank, white glance, smiling with the faint and ironical smile which means – ‘This creature is ours’ (quoted in Gunn 1964, 38).

It seems suggestive that, in both the fictional and the factual text, Lee’s initiation into this world of art and culture from which she emerges as an adult writer is marked primarily by a response to music and the voice, for both were to play an important part in her supernatural tales and in her work on aesthetics, as well as being a propelling force in her drama, Ariadne in Mantua (1903).

In her added introduction to the 1907 edition of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, Lee acknowledges the role played by music in her artistic development and she describes the mixed feelings of pleasure and pain she experienced as an adolescent whilst listening to her mother singing and playing a selection of airs from transcriptions of eighteenth-century songs newly received from Bologna. The first piece her mother plays is Pallido il Sole, ‘one of the three legendary airs … with which the madness of Saul-Philip of Spain had been soothed by virtuous David-Farinelli’, the Italian castrato (1907, xlviii).² Lee states:

I could not remain in the presence … of what, I really do not know: I felt shy of those unknown, much longed-for songs, and had to escape into the garden …. I can still feel the sickening fear, mingled with shame, lest the piece should turn out to be hideous. For if Pallido il Sole should turn out to be hideous, why …. It is impossible to put into reasonable words the overwhelming sense that on that piece hung the fate of a world, the only one which mattered – the world of my fancies and longings (1907, xlviii).

For Lee, the fate of her imaginative world, ‘the only one which mattered’, depends on this song, indicating the importance of music to her creativity. It is music that first ‘speaks’ to her and that empowers her aesthetic appreciation and her subsequent literary production (1907, xvi).

Music and the word then are intertwined in Lee’s artistic formation and it seems fitting that much of her musical philosophy addresses that fusion of word and music – the operatic voice: a voice that also dominates two of her short stories, ‘A Culture Ghost: Winthrop’s Adventure’ (1881) and ‘A Wicked Voice’ (1889). In these tales the traumatic sensations elicited in Lee as she listens to her mother singing eighteenth-century arias, are evoked by the castrato voice which first makes its appearance in the ‘enchanted garret’ of her childhood imagination. Here, in this magical, illusory realm, where she is often held in thrall by her mother’s voice, Lee ‘plays’, and finds her creative self in a pattern that suggests Winnicott’s theoretical process of individuation that occurs in the potential space between child and mother, an intermediate space in which the child must develop from ‘a state of being merged with the mother’ to ‘a stage of separating out the mother from the self’ (1971, 107).³ According to Winnicott, in this ‘resting-place’ the individual is ‘engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated’, an area of illusion which, he explains, emerges in adult life in art and culture. In Belcaro, as we have seen, Lee marks her artistic development by rejecting the fancies and longings of childhood. Yet these fantasies return forcefully in her fiction, often ‘haunted’ both literally and figuratively by the maternal voice. In the following discussion I intend to examine the ways in which this voice functions in Lee’s fictional texts, but before I do so I would like to look at the definition of the word ‘voice’ and its particular implications for Lee as a woman writer at the fin de siècle.

‘Hens that Crow’: the Maternal Song and the Vocal Object

Voice is defined as the ‘sound formed in the human larynx’ that expresses itself in speaking, shouting, and singing, but it also means to express an opinion, to have the ‘right or privilege of speaking or voting in a legislative assembly, or of taking part in, or exercising control over some particular matter’, for example in political decisions (O.E.D.). The latter definition of ‘voice’ increased in importance for women in the late nineteenth century. With the advent of a more militant commitment to women’s suffrage, the female orator became not only increasingly visible but intensely disturbing. Elaine Showalter observes that ‘The 1880s and the 1890s, in the words of the novelist George Gissing, were decades of “sexual anarchy”, when all the laws that governed sexual identity and behaviour seemed to be breaking down’ (1992, 3). She goes on to point out that the woman speaker was considered particularly deviant for ‘To claim the pulpit or the podium was in itself … a transgression of “womanly” modesty’ (1992, 24). The mannish woman orator was an object of ridicule, and during this period anti-feminist literature in the form of cartoons, sermons, and caricatures proliferated (Kahane 1995, 6). This transgressive female orator was mirrored by her literary counterpart. By the 1870s and 1880s women writers had become a force to be reckoned with even at large publishing houses like Bentley’s where more than forty percent of the authors were female, and many of them challenged the social and sexual limitations traditionally imposed on women (Showalter 1995, vi).

Despite being critical of women ‘who saw the future for their sex in an aping of purely masculine behaviour’, Lee, although ‘no suffragette’, certainly ‘wanted a vote’ and sympathized with their cause, recognizing discrimination against women as one of the ‘long-organized social evils’ (Hotchkiss 1996, 26). Moreover, as a female writer whose work constantly encroached on the predominantly masculine fields of art, history, and aesthetics, and who was herself often referred to as ‘trenchant’ and ‘outspoken’, Lee cannot avoid being associated with the powerful speaking woman (Gunn 1964, 3). Her essay ‘The Economic Parasitism of Women’ in Gospels of Anarchy (1908), which discusses, amongst other things, the inequalities of the female condition in society, attracted the hostile attention of Max Beerbohm who, on the fly-leaf of his copy of the essays, wrote:

Oh dear! Poor dear dreadful little lady! Always having a crow to pick, ever so coyly, with Nietzsche, or a wee lance to break with Mr. Carlyle, or a sweet but sharp little warning to whisper in the ear of Mr. H.G. Wells, or Strindberg or Darwin or D’Annunzio! How artfully at this moment she must be button-holing Einstein! And Signor Croce – and Mr. James Joyce! (quoted in Gunn 1964, 3).⁴

Beerbohm’s satiric diminution of Lee is perhaps a manifestation of masculine anxiety. As Gunn observes, ‘what an impressive string of celebrities he needs to hang the “poor, dear, dreadful little lady”’ (1964, 3). What is significant, however, is that Beerbohm’s passage highlights an important factor in this anxiety: her ‘voice’.⁵ Moreover, whether spoken or written, this voice is judged in relation to Lee’s sex and its attendant social limitations, a constraint which is exacerbated by the language in which her thoughts must be expressed, for as Cora Kaplan explains:

Social entry into patriarchal culture is made in language, through speech. Our individual speech does not, therefore, free us in any simple way from the ideological constraints of our culture since it is through the forms that articulate those constraints that we speak in the first place (1992, 312).

Adopting a male pseudonym, Lee was certainly aware of the need to masquerade as male in order to be taken seriously in the male literary world. In December 1878, two years before her first critical success, she writes, ‘I don’t care that Vernon Lee should be known to be myself or any other young woman, as I am sure that no one reads a woman’s writing on art, history or aesthetics with anything but unmitigated contempt’ (quoted in Gunn 1964, 66). These ‘mannish women’ who violated the codes of acceptable female behaviour were labelled ‘hens that crow’ by the New York Herald (Sept. 1852), a comparison that unquestionably highlights the double-bind which fettered the female orator and the female writer: to speak was to be unsexed, and the language in which one spoke remained indubitably male (quoted in Kahane 1995, 6).

The problematic nature of this voice as it manifests itself in female writing has been extensively discussed, most prominently by French feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, both of whom ground their debates in a valorization of the maternal voice. Cixous, for example, writes that, ‘The voice is the uterus’; it is ‘[the] song before the law, before … the symbolic’; it can ‘make the text gasp or fill it with suspense or silences, anaphorize it or tear it apart with cries’ (quoted in Stanton 1986, 167). Cixous and Irigaray also often employ ‘the age-old association of mother and water’: Cixous favours ‘topoi of the continuity and variety of the rhythms and songs of “our women’s waters”’, while for Irigaray this feminine fluidity is ‘both the amniotic waters’ and ‘the movement of the sea’ (Stanton 1986, 169; quoted in Stanton 1986, 169). Moreover, this fluidity is particularly discernible in the female voice for when ‘that woman-thing speaks … it speaks fluid’ (Irigaray 1993, 111).

Critics such as Domna Stanton, Claire Kahane, and Felicia Miller Frank rightly challenge the validity of arguments that unavoidably reinforce ‘the binary logic of opposition that produced them’, but whatever the arguments for or against, the maternal models posited by French feminists in relation to female writing do provide an interesting parallel to psychoanalytic theories of the maternal voice, for both are said to play their role in the development of subjectivity (Frank 1995, 42). Guy Rosolato, for example, has called the maternal voice a ‘blanket of sound’, a ‘sonorous envelope’; for Didier Anzieu it is ‘a bath of sounds’, a phrase which associates the voice with feminine fluidity; while Claude Bailblé describes it simply as ‘music’ (quoted in Silverman 1988, 72). ‘These tropes of the voice’, as Kahane observes, ‘are analogous to Winnicott’s “holding environment” or intermediate space in which the child’s process of individuation takes place’ (1995, 17). Here, the child is both surrounded and nurtured in an external mirror of the conditions in the mother’s womb. Within the safety of this space, the child plays with transitional objects, exploring and discovering the separate identity of objects that it has hitherto understood as part of itself, thus allowing it to acknowledge its separation from the mother and to form its subjectivity. Yet, as Lacan suggests, the mother’s voice itself must also function as a transitional object (an object like the breast, the faeces, a loved blanket or doll) from which the child must separate itself in order to become an independent subject.⁶ In this scenario, the maternal voice can function as a metaphor of nightmarish entrapment. In La Voix au Cinema, which posits the importance of sound in the study of film, Michel Chion highlights this aspect of the mother’s voice:

In the beginning, in the uterine night, was the voice, that of the Mother. For the child after birth, the Mother is more an olfactory and vocal continuum than an image. One can imagine the voice of the Mother, which is woven around the child, and which originates from all points in space as her form enters and leaves the visual field, as a matrix of places to which we are tempted to give the name ‘umbilical net’. A horrifying expression, since it evokes a cobweb – and in fact, this original vocal tie will remain ambivalent (quoted in Silverman 1988, 74).

In her reading of Chion’s work, Kaja Silverman claims that the biblical resonance of Chion’s words opposes ‘the maternal voice to the paternal word’ thus identifying ‘the mother with sound and the father with meaning’ (1988, 75). This gendered opposition between sound and meaning seems to have particular significance in relation to the operatic voice. In his now famous article, ‘“The Blue Note” and “The Objectified Voice and the Vocal Object”’, Michel Poizat writes of the common disruption inevitably experienced by the music lover – constructed here as male – who attempts to follow the text in the libretto whilst listening to a recording of a favourite opera. Certain musical passages are found to wrest his attention from the printed matter and he loses himself in listening, becoming increasingly oblivious to the written text. However, as Poizat notes, the listener feels what he describes as ‘a radical antagonism’ between letting himself be swept away by the emotion and applying himself to the meaning of each word as it is sung (1991, 199). Interestingly, this disturbing voice is characterized as feminine. It is woman’s song which presents itself as ‘pure music free of all ties to speech; singing which literally destroys speech in pursuit of a purely musical melody, a melody that develops little by little until it verges on the cry’ (Poizat 1991, 199). Poizat suggests that:

In instants such as these, when language disappears and is gradually superseded by the cry, an emotion arises which is expressible only by the irruption of something that signals the feeling of absolute loss, by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Castrato Cries and Wicked Voices
• 2 A White and Ice-cold World
• 3 Painted Dolls and Virgin Mothers
• 4 Madonna Portraits and Medusan Mirrors
• Coda
• Select Bibliography
• Index