« The Risk of Intimacy in Night and Day: Fancy, Couples and the Heteronormative Norms. »
Résumé
She could fancy Ralph suddenly sacrificing his entire career for some fantastic imagination; some cause or idea or even (so her fancy ran) for some woman seen from a railway train hanging up clothes in a back yard.’ (N&D, 115) This is how Ralph’s sister, Joan, anxious that Ralph’s ‘dreams’ may reflect upon ‘her own nature’, imagines what his brother may be in danger of if he falls in love: she fears the contingency of intimate relationships that other, less modern eras had called “love at first sight”, a fantasy of union often explained by magic. Love, its definition and the endless questions it seems to raise in social terms – whether to marry or not – or in private terms – whether the feeling experienced is one of love – is nowhere more central to Woolf’s fictional structure than in Night and Day. Woolf’s use of the word “fancy” could have been a reference to a flight of the imagination but the end of the sentence already suggests this idea. I think ‘fancy’ here is akin to how psychoanalysis defines it as a narrative structure (Abel), by which reality is filtered and given shape to, ordering and hiding the inherent lack that propels subjects to form bonds with others.