Le Fanu,
Sensationalism and
‘Significant
Pictures’
Simon
Cooke
(ISSN
1932-9598)
Le Fanu was fascinated
by art, and his writing is laden with references to visual culture. Several of
his characters are painters; his descriptive style is a traditional version of
what the Victorians called ‘picturing‘ or ‘painting in words’; and there are
many allusions to artists and artistic techniques. Of equal importance is his
writing of visual artefacts. Some of these are representations of paintings; as
Robin Wilkinson observes, he makes ‘abundant use of portraits and painted
landscapes, pictures and frames’ (277). Others are more domestic, the sort of
art-work that occupies the domain of the fire-side or the street. Wide-ranging
in his tastes and democratic in his attribution of value, Le Fanu repeatedly
speaks of tapestries and textiles, cameos, prints, steel-etchings,
wood-engravings, cartoons and illustrations in books, and his roving eye
occasionally includes such minor, vernacular items as inn-signs.
Placed within a dense
iconography of visual emblems, and explicitly aimed at a knowledgeable reader,
these pictorial objects are endowed with a variety of functions. They typically
act as a means of charting the characters’ cultural and social milieu, revealing
their sophisticated level of knowledge and education by exploring their taste in
art. They also provide a means of registering a surface realism by describing
objects that (supposedly) exist within a ‘real’ space. At once decorative and
expressive, Le Fanu’s visual items enrich his stories’ textures through a
process of allusion, and by giving them an explicit physicality.
More importantly, he
writes his artefacts as ekphrastic structures, emblematic texts within texts
which visualize important information in a ‘still’ form. Used as a mode of
distillation, a means of focusing material which is taken out of the
fast-flowing movement of the narrative, these ‘significant pictures’ have two
principal roles: they visualize aspects of character; and they comment on the
development of the plot. Writing as a purveyor of mystery, Le Fanu extends his
texts’ suggestiveness by placing visual clues which the interpreter is invited
to decode and construct, sometimes by deciding how an object should be read, and
sometimes by ‘discovering’ information which is otherwise missing or submerged.
A character’s inner thoughts, or the development of the story, are inscribed in
a visual sign, and the reader/viewer is challenged to make sense of the
structures that s/he can ‘see’. Taken as a given by the contemporary audience -
which was used to reading the clues contained in the dense surfaces of Victorian
paintings (Wood, 10) - this reading transaction is (or should be) intensely
involving, a means of drawing the reader into the surface of the text. However,
it is important to note that the author’s treatment of the visual, though
distinctive, was not in the absolute sense of the term, original.
Like many Victorian
writers of the pictorial, Le Fanu draws heavily on existing traditions. In his
analysis of ‘Schalken the Painter’ Wilkinson suggests (277) that he was
influenced by Balzac’s treatment of art in Le Chef-d’oeuvre Inconnu
(1831). Speaking more generally, it is probable that he knew and emulated the
writing of ‘significant pictures’ as they appeared in the fictions of
Le Fanu’s treatment of
art in the 1860s and 70s was materially influenced, I suggest, by these writers’
treatments of ‘significant pictures’. That said, the relationship between Le
Fanu and Sensationalism was anything but straightforward, there being a marked
disparity between Le Fanu’s assessment of his position and the judgements of
others. Critics such as S. M. Ellis and Winfred Hughes have classified Le Fanu
as a practitioner in the style of Collins and Reade (Hughes, 189), but the
writer, aware of the connection as it was made in his own time, was careful to
distance himself from his popular contemporaries. He insists in his ‘Preliminary
Word’ to Uncle Silas that the term ‘Sensationalism’ was too promiscuously
applied, and goes on to imply that his prose should be read as an updated
version of the ‘grand’ romance (US, xxiii) of Scott. Aiming to dignify
his work, he creates a clear space between his fictions and the sometimes
dubious reputation of those writing in a Sensational mode. Yet Le Fanu was an
eclectic: he was careful to exploit whatever device could be turned to his
advantage, and – notwithstanding his denials - the Sensational writing of art
was precisely the sort of ready-made convention that he characteristically takes
for his own. He insisted on his independence from contemporary trends, but the
evidence of his texts suggests otherwise.
However, this is not
to imply that he simply recreated what he read elsewhere. Rather, his approach
was a complicated mix of borrowing and manipulation. Driven forward by
the need to publish, he sometimes draws directly from Sensational texts, using
the trope of picture-making as a pre-existing discourse that was understood by
the contemporary audience of the 60s and 70s. Yet, at the same time, his method
was often a matter of stretching or testing the language, writing and re-writing
the idea of the significant object as a means of creating a series of
idiosyncratic effects. At once exploitative and inventive, Le Fanu uses
Sensational texts as a rich source of material, a pre-existing series of signs
which could function as it does in the writings of the Sensationalists, or could
be moulded to his own, particular ends.
Le Fanu’s treatment
of ‘narrative pictures’ was heavily influenced, it can be argued, by the example
of Collins. In Collins’s fictions, visual artefacts are typically used to
enhance the reader’s involvement in the story by extending it backwards or
forwards in time, and the same technique is adopted by Le Fanu. Le Fanu is
notably influenced by Collins’s use of pictorial objects as the emblems of the
past, so creating a contrast between what has been, and the present. Le Fanu’s
writing of this technique, which is essentially a matter of stretching the
narrative to reach outside its linear frame, can be demonstrated by tracing the
parallels between Collins’s ‘pictures’, as they appear in a range of fictions,
and his own.
Collins often deploys
visual emblems as a means of creating a contrast between the innocence of a
character’s past experiences and the iniquity of the present, and Le Fanu
follows the same pattern. This process is initially realized in terms of a
visual mapping of the character‘s history. There is a marked similarity, for
instance, between the visual models in Basil (1852, 1862), which signify
the hero’s state of grace before he married Margaret, and those appearing in
Uncle Silas (1864).
The prime similarity
is registered in terms of two cameos. In Basil, the narrator’s previous
innocence is signalled by a ‘miniature portrait’ (201); and in Uncle Silas
we are shown an enamel of Silas as he was, a ‘handsome’ child with ‘fair
golden hair and large eyes’ (55). Both signs are the embodiment of ‘pretty’ (US,
55) naiveté, and Le Fanu is careful to recreate Collins’s notion of the cameo as
a timeless distillation of some Edenic age. More importantly, Le Fanu highlights
the dramatic disjuncture between past and present by recreating the Collinsian
opposition of what was and what is. This is realized, once again,
by following the model provided by Basil. In Collins’s text, the horrors
of the present are embodied in the contrast between the boyish face in the
portrait (201) and Basil’s adult visage, distorted with shame (200); and the
same approach, marking a gulf between the boy and the adult, is made in Uncle
Silas. Indeed, Le Fanu extends Collins’s technique, building a series of
grotesque juxtapositions between Silas’s appearance as a child and his malign
appearance as an old man. Once a ‘hero’ with a ‘beautiful’ face (US, 55),
his later physiognomy, taken from the flesh, but described as if it were a
‘Dutch portrait’, is a matter of ‘fearful’ gaze and ‘strange eyes’ (189), even
his golden curls (the conventional sign of hope and innocence) having given way
to a menacing combination of silver hair and black eyebrows. Figured as a
‘mystery’ (55) when he is young, Silas is later revealed as unambiguously
wicked, as if his original goodness were somehow placed, as Cousin Monica
implies, in the ‘coffin’ (55).
The present has
cancelled the events of the past, but here, as in the example provided by
Collins’s text, the difference between what was and what has happened is
dramatically embodied in the relationship between the unchanging signature of
art, which arrests time, and the endless process of evil and corruption, which
leaves its marks on the characters’ malleable physiognomies.
Read morally, this change
from beauty to ugliness is a representation of the corrosive nature of sin, the
process which leads from paradise to the fall. The portraits might otherwise be
read in terms of the Freudian uncanny, as emblems which indicate the characters’
repression of moral iniquity, of shameful wickedness which will
ultimately return to register its presence on their faces. Of course, this
interpretation discounts the idea of innocence by implying that both individuals
are simply suppressing their essential natures. The portraits become in this
sense the embodiment of anxious self-containment – a notion that is given weight
by the fact that both pictures seem hermetically sealed, as if they were
collection of static signifiers in which timeless beauty is the subject. But
portraits in Collins and Le Fanu are more generally written as images that work
the other way around, revealing the ‘truth’ of a person’s history while the
‘real’ face is a sign of repression. Anticipating the arrangement in Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), such pictures are the signifiers of anxiety,
the reminders of what lies within the mind when the flesh itself is a deceptive
screen.
Once again, Collins
provides a model arrangement, and there are close similarities between his
treatments and Le Fanu’s. A particular focus is realized in terms of full-size
portraits, signs of the past which symbolize a repressed anxiety or shameful
act. In Collins’s fictions this usually takes the form of pictures which are
literally rotten: written as symbolic exemplifications of some ‘rotten’ act,
they function as a sort of cancer, an illness that will never heal even though
it is hidden away. In The Dead Secret, for example, the ‘bulging’
(22) portrait-frames are the emblem of Sarah’s moral deception: she may conceal
(or repress) the fact that she knows the truth of her mistress’s parentage, but
the ‘wickedness’ of her act is preserved, a secret that will never go away, in
the very fabric of the frame and its crumbling gilt. Likewise, in Le Fanu’s
Checkmate the ‘perfectly rotten’ (7) picture is a concrete reminder of
Longcluse’s iniquitous history. He manages to preserve an outward appearance
that is smoothly respectable, but the true nature of his villainies is
symbolized, once again, by the preservation of a physical object.
The same can be said
of many other pictures. Written as the persistent signs of guilt, such portraits
recur throughout the fictions of Collins and Le Fanu. The symbolism of The
Dead Secret reappears in the form of the decomposing portrait in The
Wyvern Mystery (63); it further registers as a ‘mildewed’ tapestry in
‘Squire Toby’s Will’, which symbolizes Toby’s appalling treatment of his sons
(James, 26); and again in the ‘disgusting picture’, openly linked with insanity
and ‘illness’, that menaces the characters in ‘The Haunted Baronet’ (Bleiler,
158) as they try to uncover the circumstances surrounding a mysterious death.
In these pictures, as in
Collins’s, the power of the past can never be overcome; as Collins puts it in
No Name, ‘nothing in this world is hidden for ever’ (21), and consequences
will always take their course. In Freudian terms, the repressed will always
return. Of course, the notion of the past extending forward and ruining the
present is deeply fatalistic, and it is noticeable that both writers write texts
that postulate the idea of human behaviour being trapped by a sort of malign
predestination. What has been will continue to resonate, or fester. The
characters may have hidden their secrets in the past or in their unconscious
minds, but the pictures act as revenants, ghosts of the repressed that compel
the individual to face the truth.
Equally menacing is the
future, and this time significant pictures are used to predict what will
happen as the narrative unfolds. Always aiming to manipulate his readers and
build the maximum impression of unendurable suspense, Collins provides a
extended model in which future events are ‘purposely foreshadowed’ (Preface to
No Name). Tension is built through the provision of clues and the
reader’s expectations are heightened by a process of anticipation. His approach
is partly expressed in Hide and Seek, in which Matt’s return from
The
griffins, cupids, and so on , were, I must own, most beautiful to behold; though
so many in number, so entangled in flowers and devices, and so topsy-turvy in
their actions and attitudes, that you felt them unpleasantly in your head for
hours…(94).
Never less than a
‘mess’ (94), this picture suggestively points to the ‘entangled’
complications, the
’topsy-turvy’ confusion that will unfold as the narrative traces the
vicissitudes of the jewel’s pursuit. Crystallizing its information in the form
of another symbolic exemplification, it shows in a still moment how time, the
workings of the narrative, will unfold.
The same technique is
used in Le Fanu’s reworking of this motif. There is a half-echo of Collins’s
emblematic griffins in the form of the inn-sign that hangs outside the ‘George
and Dragon’ in ‘The Haunted Baronet’ (Bleiler, 61), and symbolic figures and
arabesques - the tokens of impending confusion and doom - recur elsewhere. In
‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’, the narrator inspects an emblematic device
which suggestively points to the underlying truth of his situation:
I
remember, especially, one device, it was the figure of a stork, painted in
carmine…The bird was standing upon one leg, and in the other held a stone (In
a Glass Darkly, 121).
Apparently no more than decorative, this image identifies the characters’ menace
as they prepare to strike the narrator. The stork is holding a stone, and so,
metaphorically speaking, are they. The stone is also identified as an emblem of
‘vigilance’ (121), the very quality that the speaker so spectacularly fails to
display. The heraldic panel might be read, in other words, as a symbolic
representation which contains an element of ironic commentary.
Placed in the opening pages, it
figures what is to come in a coded form and acts as a version of mis-en-abyme,
a representation in miniature of the overall situation or narrative that
contains it. In Derrida’s terms, it provides a symbolic ‘patch within a patch’,
a ‘multiplication’ in which a small detail exemplifies the design of the whole
(37). The effects of mis-en-abyme, the notion of a mirror within a
mirror, are given another twist in Uncle Silas.
Maud’s predicament is exemplified
by the details of a tapestry after the Dutch painter of landscape and genre,
Philips Wouvermans (1619-68). Replete with scenes of ‘falconry, and the chase,
dogs (and) hawks’ (US, 3), this emblem figures the unfolding story as a
hunt in which Maud becomes the prey. The motif of pursuit is later taken up and
made more explicit when Maud contemplates a ‘large quarto with coloured prints’
(337), one of which is an image of a ‘girl…flying in terror’, menaced by the
threat of being ‘devoured and fought over by beasts of prey’ (338). Grotesque in
effect, both sets of artefacts reveal the grim reality of Maud’s situation,
showing what will happen, what is to come, and what should be feared. Recalling
the dragons and cupids in The Moonstone, they point to a future which is
both ‘topsy-turvey’ and heavy with fear. Situated as a series of mirrors within
mirrors or doors within doors, they suggest a sort of endless recession of fear,
a paradoxical filling of the void of terror with signs of terror. As
Derrida explains, mis-en-abyme ‘always occupies itself…somewhere filling
up, full of abyss, filling up the abyss’ (34).
Speaking more
generally, these analogies suggest the extent of Le Fanu’s indebtedness to
Collins. Collins’s writing of symbolic objects provided him with a code which
was well-defined and laden with implication, easily subsumed within an
apparently realistic surface and, at the same time, intelligible to a
contemporary audience that was already familiar with the conventions of the
Sensational ‘picture’. Le Fanu may have distanced himself from Sensationalism,
but in his writing of art, as in his emphasis on mystery and the process of
active decoding, he used Collins’s texts as a fertile source.
Braddon’s novels were
equally significant, although Le Fanu’s approach to her treatment of pictures is
characterized not by the sort of homage that he paid to Collins, but by a
dynamic mixture of acceptance, experimentation and questioning. This process of
borrowing and adapting is especially applied to his writing of pictorial emblems
which, as Lynette Felber explains in a suggestive article on Victorian picturing
and the ‘literary portrait’, ‘conspicuously’ function to ‘establish character’
(471).
At least half of Le
Fanu’s response is a matter of literary recreation in which he revisits
Braddon’s visual writing of character. He is particularly interested in her
representation of personality through a process of association, a technique in
which the essential traits of character are revealed by linking an individual to
a significant object. The influence of this approach is suggested by the
relationship between the art-work in Braddon’s Vixen and the pictures in
‘Squire Toby’s Will’. In Vixen, Braddon unambiguously reveals Mrs.
Tempest’s sensuality by connecting her with the ‘Cupids and Graces’ which dance
with the ‘airiest attitudes’ on her illustrated fan (13). Likewise, in ‘Squire
Toby’s Will’, Le Fanu identifies the dead squire’s malevolence by making one of
his sons return to his favourite room, a place that once contained a
tapestry of King Herod (James, 26-7). Both treatments use minor detail
emblematically, as a means to underline aspects of character, and there are many
instances when Le Fanu’s characters, like Braddon’s, are subtly exposed through
their association with what is apparently only an insignificant part of the
décor. Once again, the pictures invite analysis in terms of mis-en-abyme,
this time as signs of character, synedoches which encapsulate the aspects of
personality that are otherwise developed in the narrative as a whole.
This highly focused
technique is particularly useful as a means of revealing villainy, and there are
marked analogies between Braddon’s exposure of inner corruption and Le Fanu’s.
There is a close linkage, it can be argued, between Braddon’s unmasking of
Lancelot Darrell in Eleanor’s Victory, and Le Fanu’s revelations of the
duplicitous Lady Vernon in The Rose and the Key. In Braddon’s text,
Lancelot’s essential wickedness is revealed by the ugliness of his painting (Eleanor’s
Victory, 382); and in Le Fanu’s the ‘saturnine’ pictures point to her
curious combination of wickedness and despair, sensuality and a sort of
melodramatic madness (Rose and Key, 425).
Le Fanu was more generally
influenced by Braddon’s technique of inscription, of writing character into the
very fabric of a painted surface. Braddon’s model is exemplified by the much
discussed portrait of Lady Audley in Lady Audley’s Secret. This
voyeuristic image mediates between surface and inner depth, appearance and
reality:
The
painter must have been a Pre-Raphaelite. No one but a Pre-Raphaelite would have
painted, hair by hair, those feathery masses of ringlets…..but I suppose the
painter had copied quaint medieval monstrosities until his brain had grown
bewildered, for my lady…had something
of the aspect of a beautiful fiend (Lady Audley’s Secret,
70-1).
By
looking through the surface of the painting, so Braddon implies, it is
possible to ‘see’ the essential personality which, it seems, is usually a
contradiction of the smooth and duplicitous exterior. This technique, a means of
revealing inner in the fabric of the outer, is taken up by Le Fanu, and finds a
parallel expression in several of his texts. However, his response to Braddon’s
writing of personality is subject to the process of re-interpretation.
Proceeding from the idea that pictures might show a person’s inner appearance,
he writes a series of portraits which are indebted to Braddon, but offer a much
greater complexity and suggestiveness. Often this reveals the characters’
innermost thoughts and anxieties even when they themselves are only
half-aware of their mental and emotional condition.
Le Fanu’s revisiting
of Braddon is exemplified by the portrait in Carwell,
The portrait in The
Wyvern Mystery reads, in short, as a new treatment of Braddon’s picture
making. The portrait of Lady Audley reveals the inner fiend, and according to
Sophie Andres, is a sign of a female writer’s ‘transgressions of gender’ (4);
but the portraits of Le Fanu reveal the workings of mind in terms of a dense
ambiguity and strangeness which defies any simple process of labelling and is
expressed - or perhaps only implied - in the shape of visual distortions and
visual uncertainty. Braddon voyeuristically gives us a salacious glimpse of the
inner ‘fiend‘, but Le Fanu offers pictorial images which only allow us to see
‘darkly’. This experimental treatment of Braddon’s Sensational pictures is taken
to an absolute extreme in his later texts, notably in his writing of the
artefacts associated with his own, supernatural ‘fiend’, the vampire Carmilla of
In a Glass Darkly (1872).
Carmilla is initially
linked to a tapestry representing Cleopatra (In a Glass Darkly, 258), an
image Braddon manipulates as a means of underlining the voluptuousness of Aurora
Floyd (Aurora Floyd, 29).Working with Braddon’s sign, Le Fanu classifies
Carmilla as another femme fatale. However, he enhances the range
of association, using even the smallest details to suggest psychological nuance.
For example, he specifies the asp at Cleopatra’s bosom, an emblem that suggests
the parasitic act of vampirism which leads, this time, not to Carmilla’s death,
but to the death of her victims. It further implies her satanic wickedness as a
type of evil spirit; her ability to change shape; and her sexual indeterminacy.
Later to demonstrate the masculinised ‘ardour of a lover’ (IGD, 246),
Carmilla is endowed, as it were, with a surrogate penis, an asp that allows her
to ‘puncture’ (IGD, 247) her victims as if she were a man. Such sexual
destructiveness is the central part of her character, and Le Fanu inscribes
other negative messages in the morbid fabric of Carmilla’s room.
The ‘sombre classic
scenes’ suggest the underlying melancholy of Carmilla’s character, as does the
‘gloom’ of the tapestry, which seems (like Carmilla herself) to be timeless.
Equally important is combination of splendour and fading. She herself is a
‘little faded’ (258) in the spiritual sense, but, like the exotic gilding, is
characterized by lush corporeality. Repeatedly described in terms of her
physical beauty, Carmilla’s essential showiness is signalled by the details of
‘gold carving’ and ‘rich and varied colour’. Indeed, Le Fanu stresses the
connection by making linguistic links between the description of the images and
their decorations and Carmilla‘s appearance. The decorations are ‘gold’ (258)
and so is Carmilla’s hair, which contains ‘something of gold’ (262); the
surrounds are ‘rich and varied’ (258), and her complexion ‘rich and brilliant’
(268).
Such echoes point to a sort of confusion between the art-works and the
character; the artefacts are merely illusion, visual lures that conceal an inner
emptiness, and the same is true of Carmilla.
Strange and disturbing
in effect, the tapestry and its details are figured as highly ambiguous signs of
a highly complicated character. Lady Audley’s character is only partially
concealed behind the Pre-Raphaelite detail, but Carmilla is far more difficult
to classify. Using art as a material showing of the strange, Le Fanu suggests
her status as an irreducible ‘paradox’ (IGD, 264). Carmilla’s
mysteriousness is finally visualized in her portrait.
This painting is
written as an emblematic representation of a series of uncertainties. Figured as
a mirror image of its subject - a point stressed by the anagram ‘Mircalla’,
which reverses Carmilla’s name - the portrait locates her mysterious status by
complicating the idea of reflection. If the picture is a mirror, a Mircalla to
represent a Carmilla, then it should be viewed as one half of an opposition that
contrasts art and life, death and life, and timelessness and time. In the words
of Derrida, the idea of mimetic art is a matter of oppositions in which
‘meaning/form, inside/outside, content/container’ are constantly opposed (22).
However, Le Fanu complicates the process
of interpretation by effacing or at least blurring the differences between the
painted image and its motif. The
picture should represent death - but its representation of Carmilla seems ‘to
live’ at the very moment that Carmilla herself is described in funereal terms as
an ‘effigy’. The portrait should be a purely timeless artefact - and yet it is
Carmilla who is unchanged by the process of ageing, while the painting is almost
‘obliterated’ with the ‘smoke and dust’ of time (272). The painting should also
represent the inert qualities of the constructed object, and yet it is Carmilla,
whose seems to have been assembled, out of a series of lush female signifiers,
as the perfect feminine type (262).
This doubling and muddling
of picture and pictured has the effect of unsettling the outlines of Carmilla’s
identity. Placed before the reader/viewer’s mind’s eye, the confusion of
character and motif is designed to generate a series of questions. Presented
with a calculated obfuscation of the truth, we are invited to ask who (or what)
is the ‘real’ Carmilla? Is it the ‘living’ body, which possesses the timeless
properties of the eternal dead, or is it the picture (that appropriately shows
its age)? Is Carmilla ‘alive’,
given the fact that the picture shows her to be alive, while the
inscription, dated 1698, proves that she can only be dead? These questions are
created by the interaction of painting and model, creating an oscillation of
uncertainty. In the terms of Julian Wolfreys, the transaction presents a
‘structural undecidability’ (15), a sense of oddness and defamiliarization in
which the picture and its motif haunt each other, and the character’s
‘true’ identity is dissolved, made ever more elusive, fearful and strange.
This ‘strangeness of
framing and borders’ (Royle, 2) is
written, in other words, in terms which allow it to be analysed as another
version of the uncanny. Indeed, the interaction of the subject and her painted
image closely conforms to many of the features identified in Freud’s essay. The
confrontation of doubles invokes feelings of dread, with the ‘double’ -
whichever that is - acting as a ‘harbinger of death’ (9). Most tellingly, the
construction of the picture and its subject is a prime example of Freud’s belief
that the uncanny will typically arise when it is impossible to differentiate
between art and life, impossible to tell whether ‘an object is alive or not’
(8). In Le Fanu’s treatment of this most confusing of portraits, the ‘homely’
and ‘unhomely’ characteristically collide and commingle into one: what was
‘hidden’ (12) returns, and the baffling reality of Carmilla’s eternal ‘life’ is
re-injected into the domestic circle of Laura’s pedestrian home. Significantly,
Laura wants to hang the portrait in her bedroom - the very room, once assumes,
where she first made her appearance during Laura’s childhood (IGD, 272).
The repressed returns to the place it first appeared, and Laura’s response, as
if in recognition of the release of some pent-up psychological energy, is one of
possessive (and regressive) ‘wonder’ (272).
Taken as a whole, this
deadly confusion represents a new departure in the writing of the Sensational
portrait. It greatly extends the range of expression in both Braddon and
Collins. In part a matter of borrowing and appropriation, a means of building
suspense and enhancing character, in Le Fanu’s treatment the visual artefact is
finally developed into a new and complicated form. Always willing to exploit an
existing discourse, Le Fanu transforms the ‘significant pictures’ of Collins and
Braddon into terrifying signs of supernatural uncertainties and psychological
extremes.
In memory of Professor Chris Brooks
Works Cited
The works
of Collins, Braddon and Le Fanu have never been issued in the form of a
‘standard edition’. Citation is therefore a complicated process. Numerous modern
editions of most of their fictions are available, although the original
printings are generally extremely scarce. For reasons of clarity I have only
referred to a range of accessible imprints.
Andres,
Sophie. ‘Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Ambivalent Pre-Raphaelite Ekphrasis’.
Victorian Newsletter (2005). Reproduced at
www.the freelibrary.com
Bleiler,
E. F., ed. Best Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu.
Braddon,
Mary Elizabeth. Aurora Floyd. 1862;
-----------------------------. Eleanor’s Victory. 1863; Stroud: Sutton,
1996.
-----------------------------. Lady Audley’s Secret. 1862;
-----------------------------.
Vixen. 1879; Stroud: Sutton, 1993.
Collins,
Wilkie. Basil. 1852;
-----------------. Hide and
Seek. 1854;
-----------------. No Name. 1863;
-----------------. The Dead Secret. 1857; Stroud: Sutton, 1986.
-----------------. The Moonstone. 1868; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Derrida,
Jaques. The Truth in Painting.
Eds.Geoff Bennington and Ian Mcleod.
Ellis, S.
M. Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others.
Felber,
Lynette. ‘The Literary Portrait as Centrefold: Fetishism in Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret’. Victorian Literature and Culture, 35
(2007): 471-88.
Freud,
Sigmund. ‘The Uncanny’. Imago, 5 (1919); reproduced at
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html
Hughes,
Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensational Novels of the 1860s.
Princeton:
James, M.
R., ed. Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery. 1923; Ware:
Wordsworth, 1994.
Le Fanu,
Joseph Sheridan. Checkmate. 1871; Stroud: Sutton, 1997.
------------------------------. In a Glass Darkly. 1872;
-------------------------------. The Rose and the Key.
1871;
-------------------------------. The Wyvern Mystery.
1869;
Stroud: Sutton, 1994.
-------------------------------. Uncle Silas.
1864;
Maturin,
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