Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales

by Patricia Pulham

In her persuasively argued study, Patricia Pulham astutely combines psychoanalytic theory with socio-historical criticism to examine a selection of fantastic tales by the female aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935). Lee's own definition of the supernatural in the preface to Hauntings questions the nature of the 'genuine ghost', and argues that this figure is not found in the Society of Psychical Research but in our own psyches, where it functions as a mediator between past and present. Using D.W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts, Pulham argues that the prevalence of the past in Lee's tales signifies not only an historical but a psychic past. Thus the 'ghosts' that haunt Lee's supernatural fiction, as well as her aesthetic, psychological, and historical writings, held complex meanings for her that were fundamental to her intellectual development and allowed her to explore alternative identities that permit the expression of transgressive sexualities.

188 pages, Hardcover

First published May 22, 2008

About the author

My research interests centre on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature, art and culture, with a particular focus on decadent writing and aestheticism, queer studies, late-Victorian Gothic fiction, and the neo-Victorian novel. I am author of Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (Ashgate Press, 2008), and have published on a range of other nineteenth-century writers including Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde and Olive Custance in academic journals such as the Yearbook of English Studies and the Victorian Review. I have also co-edited several collections of essays including Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film (Continuum, 2011). Most recently, with Páraic Finnerty, I co-edited ‘Decadent Crossings’, a Special Issue of Symbiosis, 16.2. (October, 2012), and was lead editor of a four-volume facsimile collection: Spiritualism, 1840-1930, published by Routledge in January 2014. I am currently writing a monograph on the Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature, which is contracted to Edinburgh University Press.

I have organised several international conferences including ‘The Other Dickens’, held in July 2012 at the University of Portsmouth to mark the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth. I am committed to public engagement and have participated in several regional events including a public talk on 'Sculpture and Painting in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray' at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth (November 2013) and 'Ghostwatching: Spiritualism 1840–1945', evening event which I organised and hosted, that included a round-table discussion with experts Rosario Arias (University of Málaga), Dr Christine Ferguson (University of Glasgow) and Dr Tatiana Kontou (Oxford Brookes University), and featured A Kind Of Conjuration, a play about the medium Helen Duncan, written and performed by a local theatre company.

I welcome applications from prospective PhD students who would like to work on projects relating to Victorian literary heritage, late-Victorian decadence and aestheticism, nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, or the neo-Victorian novel.