Resurrecting the Victorians

Abstract

The Victorian era and its narrative structures continue to haunt contemporary culture, and many neo-Victorian writers seek to understand that relationship between the present and the past through an explicit engagement with ghosts.¹ While other historical fictions use ghosts to explore the relationship between the present and the past, most notably Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1990, 1993, 1995), in neo-Victorian fictions the engagement with ghosts is usually connected to the specific context of nineteenth-century spiritualism. Therefore, these fictions tend to incorporate not only ghosts, but also medium figures. Writing about the usefulness of the tropes of haunting and spectrality for thinking about ‘the contemporary novel’s sense of the Victorian’, O’Gorman notes that ghosts are, for the most part, passive’ (p. 3). By adopting the figure of the medium, then, the neo-Victorian novels discussed in this chapter seek to establish a more active engagement with the Victorian past. Neo-Victorian authors also use the figure of the medium as a means to explore the forms of historical narratives, including that of historical fiction itself. While there have been several neo-Victorian novels that deal with spiritualism, the discussion in this chapter focuses on just three: Michèle Roberts’s In the Red Kitchen (1990) A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Conjugial Angel’ (1992) and Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999).