(Spirit) Photography and the Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel

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Notes

See, for example, Peter Buse and Andrew Stott's Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (1999), Avery F. Gordon's Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997) and Nicholas Royle's The Uncanny (2003).

I am indebted to the anonymous external reader of this essay who has drawn my attention to the work of Zoë Beloff and the echoes between new digital media and nineteenth-century technological advances. I also wish to express my gratitude to Rebecca Munford and Paul Young for their encouragement and perceptive comments on this piece.

For more information about the uses of spectrality and haunting in neo-Victorian fiction, see the introduction to Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (2009), edited by Patricia Pulham and Rosario Arias.

See Alex Owen, Janet Oppenheim, and Diana Basham for traditional accounts of the Spiritualist movement both in Britain and in the States.

Although William Mumler is generally acknowledged as the first spirit photographer, the Victorian fascination with ghosts in relation to photography can be traced back to the effects produced by stereographs in the 1850s. I owe this piece of information to the anonymous external reader of this essay.

For a different perception of ectoplasm and that of ectoplasm images, see Karl Schoonover. In his article Schoonover convincingly argues that ectoplasm photographs capture the referentiality and indexicality of photography.

Nick Peim suggests that photography can be studied within the logic of hauntology and the concept of the trace as a photographic text, which is permanently demanding what is not there, “the supplementary engagement of a subject” (82). For more information about photography as a trace, see Peter Geimer's “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm” (2007). Geimer's work stems from Susan Sontag's original considerations of the photograph as a vestige of the past.

Kate Mitchell's work is concerned with some of the issues I develop in this essay. Although she does not specifically tackle spirit photography, Mitchell does indeed carry out a thorough examination of photography in neo-Victorian fiction as a tool to assuage loss, as well as to fix transience in the novels under study.

For more information concerning this scientist's connection with Spiritualism, see Richard Noakes' chapter in The Victorian Supernatural (23–43).

It is noteworthy that recent publications on photography and trauma have focused on Charcot's work on hysterical patients at La Salpetriére. In this sense, Ulrich Baer's Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (2002) offers a reading of “this haunting pictorial record” that differs from that given by, for example, Elaine Showalter in The Female Malady (1985). Baer indicates that “Charcot looked for what remained invisible to his patients and […] he had had the courage to look at this spectral residue” (14).

In 2000 Zoë Beloff directed a 3D film based on the 1897 autobiography of Elizabeth D'Esperance, which exemplifies the interaction between nineteenth-century Spiritualism and its dialogue with technology, and the contemporary work of new media artists. More information is available at her website: http://ww.zoebeloff.com.

Interestingly, Mitchell proposes an innovative approach to both novels—the notion of “embodied memory.” She contends that the retrieval of past images is inextricably connected with the figure of the mother: “each novel is infused with dead or irretrievable mothers; each of the characters' mothers has died or is irrevocably absent” (208).

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Notes on contributors

Rosario Arias

Rosario Arias is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Málaga where she received her PhD in English in 2001. She was a Visiting Researcher at Brunel University in 2002. She has published a number of articles on contemporary Women's fiction and psychoanalysis in refereed journals. Her main research areas are neo-Victorian fiction, the occult and revisions of the past. She has most recently contributed to Frank Lauterbach and Jan Alber's Stones of Law—Bricks of Shame (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming), and is currently co-editing a volume of essays on haunting and spectrality in neo-Victorian fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).