She’s Not There: Vertigo and the Ghostly Feminine

Abstract

I have been leading up so far to what I would now like to term gothic identity; that is, one that resists the discrete categories of Victorian stable identity. This gothic identity is most clearly observable in forms of discourse, most identifiably in narrative returns from the dead. As we have seen throughout this study, narratives proliferate and return from the dead in an altered form. In Our Mutual Friend, first person narration is buried deep in the interstices of the multiplot novel but returns in the middle of the narrative and presents identity as an effect of doubling and death. In The Ladies’ Paradise, the spectacle produces an identity that is a function of the parade; that is to say, identity becomes a succession of images: a cinema of the imagination.