“He was growing perfectly unstrung, like a hysterical woman”: patriarchal malaise towards female spaces in Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst” - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

“He was growing perfectly unstrung, like a hysterical woman”: patriarchal malaise towards female spaces in Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst”

Résumé

Recent research on Vernon Lee’s 1886 ghost story “Oke of Okehurst; or, The Phantom Lover” has suggested that the actual haunting presence in this tale—ostensibly the story of a Victorian woman’s doomed romantic entanglement with a ghost—is either a projection of her murderous husband’s jealousy, or the wife herself in her transgressive quest for agency. This paper aims to reconcile both perspectives by arguing that the story is actually haunted by the metaphorical ghost of a disrupted Victorian doctrine of separate spheres. In this reading, the wife’s haunted drawing-room stands as the site of battle between competing ideologies regarding a woman’s place within the Victorian household. This private room is depicted as the impenetrable space wherein the wife can channel her imaginative power into an escapist fantasy that ultimately enables her to cross gender boundaries and to negotiate her own sexual agency outside the constraints of heterosexual marriage. However, while the drawing-room becomes a place for female emancipation, it also morphs into a site of male emasculation that destabilises Victorian gender roles, entrapping the husband into female roles and undermining masculine rationality. The eventual confrontation with the ghost thus takes the shape of a violation of the wife’s sanctuary in order to reclaim masculinity, which the story portrays as a crime that destroys the very institution of marriage it purported to reestablish. Nevertheless, the story’s apparent polarisation of gender roles and domestic spaces seems contradicted by the male narrator’s ability to enter both spouses’ private spaces. This paper will thus also discuss the narrative voice’s ambiguous position as outsider and mediator in this collapsing Victorian household, aiming to determine whether it encourages readers to sympathize with the patriarchal loss of authority or with the assertion of female agency.

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Littératures
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Dates et versions

hal-04654515 , version 1 (19-07-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04654515 , version 1

Citer

Emilie Laurent. “He was growing perfectly unstrung, like a hysterical woman”: patriarchal malaise towards female spaces in Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst”. ‘Places and Spaces in Victorian Popular Literature and Culture’ - The 16th Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, Victorian Popular Fiction Association, Jul 2024, Canterbury, UK, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-04654515⟩
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