History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction by Victorian Afterimages

Author:Victorian Afterimages
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

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‘Making it seem like it’s authentic’: the Faux-Victorian Novel as Cultural Memory in Affinity and Fingersmith

A forgotten past is encountered again in fantastic literature. The recounting of that past heals an occluded memory.

(Renate Lachmann ‘Cultural Memory and the Role of Literature’, 2004)

The spirit-medium’s proper home is neither this world nor the next, but that vague and debatable land which lies between them.

(Sarah Waters, Affinity, 1999)

If Possession asserts the ‘truth of the imagination’, then Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002) harness this truth to invent a genealogy of lesbian desire that exists only as shadows at the margins of Victorian literature and history. In contrast to Waterland and Possession, each of which constructs a contemporary frame for its representation of the Victorian period, Affinity and Fingersmith are examples of faux-Victorian fiction; novels written in the Victorian tradition that refuse to self-reflexively mark their difference from it in the characteristically parodic mode of historiographic metafiction. These novels revive Victorian novelistic traditions, offering themselves as stylistic imitations of Victorian fiction. Yet what they imitate they also re-imagine and extend: What would the Victorian novel have looked like had it represented other voices? By depicting female homosexuality in the Victorian period, Waters ‘puts the weight of historical precedent behind lesbian existence’ (Kohlke, 2004: 65). However she uses the mnemonic power of literature to do it.

Rather than represent the process of constructing the past, highlighting the limits of historical representation whether in history or fiction, Waters silently inserts her depiction of nineteenth-century female homosexuality into our cultural memory of Victorian fiction. In order to invent a genealogy of lesbian desire, Waters mobilises literary forms that were considered typically feminine; Victorian gothic and sensation fiction were each associated with women as readers, writers and characters. And each created a fantastic space where cultural anxieties, especially those pertaining to gender ideals and sexuality, could be creatively explored. Linked to the representation of transgressive women, and to the depiction of female sexuality, these genres are perhaps the most likely sites where a lesbian tradition could have been voiced or, in fact, may have been voiced in muted, displaced ways. Deploying the easily recognisable tropes of gothic and sensation fiction, and extending their field of representation to include the representation of female homosexuality, Waters’ use of Victorian narrative strategies and generic conventions provides a structure within which her invented ‘history’ can be written, remembered, and communicated as cultural memory. In this way a genealogy of female homoeroticism is mapped on to our sense of Victorian literary and cultural history.

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