Painted Portraits and Androgynous Apparitions in the Haunted-Portrait Narratives of Vernon Lee and E. Nesbit

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s dramatic monologue “The Portrait” (1870) begins with an elegiac lament from an artist, gazing upon a portrait of his dead beloved: “This is her image as she was:/It seems a thing to wonder on,/As though mine image in a glass/Should tarry when myself am gone.” 1 Rossetti’s verse not only preserves the image of a dead beloved in art, but presents the portrait as a mirror, timelessly preserving the artist’s reflection after he, too, has perished. Rossetti’s poem was one of many nineteenth-century narratives penned by male writers of Aestheticism and Decadence that utilized the preservation of a beautiful woman in portrait form to assuage the male artist’s fear of death. It is this paradox, of existing in art, as an image of both male fears and fantasies, beyond life itself, that this article seeks to explore. Through the examination of two haunted-portrait narratives penned by female writers, Vernon Lee’s “Amour Dure” (1890) and E. Nesbit’s “The Ebony Frame” (1893), the concept of the haunted portrait will be analysed as a seductive force, encapsulating a beautiful young woman residing at the seemingly paradoxical intersection of sexuality and death. In both texts spectral femmes fatales haunt and seduce nineteenth-century male writers for their own, perhaps malign, purposes, allowing for an examination as to how Lee and Nesbit “re-frame” male-authored representations of portraiture. In doing so, it will be discussed how Lee and Nesbit subtly utilize the ghost story to corrupt the prevailing, masculine aesthetic principles of Aestheticism and Decadence, recording the amoral beauty of the femme fatale, and recording the visual subordination of spectator to objet d’art.