GHOSTS, AESTHETICISM, AND “VERNON LEE”

Abstract

“TO RAISE A REAL SPECTRE of the antique is a craving of our own century” (104) writes “Vernon Lee” in her early collection of essays on aesthetics, Belcaro. The nineteenth century is indeed, as Julia Briggs has pointed out, an age which craves ghost stories of all kinds. Sceptical of the supernatural yet nostalgic for it (Briggs 19), the age turns to ghost stories to assuage its lost faith. Ghosts, if nothing else, might still glimmer in the empty spaces of a universe vacated by the gods but not yet filled with the space journeys of science and science fiction. Their questionable shapes thus continue to shape the questions of an age seeking reassurance, even if that reassurance comes in a spasm of terror. And terror, however subtly or ingeniously aroused, whether by the self-induced fantasies of James’s governess or the calculated self-hauntings of Stevenson’s Jekyll, remains the primary motivation and aim of the ghost story. Fear of the unknown, whether within or without, provides the last bastion of a supernaturalism under threat from the encroaching “materialism” (Briggs 24) of the modern world. The ghost story not only indulges the unstable, if sometimes deeply conventional order of fantasy at the expense of “naturalistic art” (Cavaliero 7); it also indulges the wish to believe in another, more fearful world, beyond the material order of things. The specter focuses this trouble of belief. It is there and not there. It outlines emptiness but also fills it up, embodying and disembodying its own reality at the same time.