"[T]he Ghost of Myself": Women, Art, and (Neo-) Sensational Representation in Joanne Harris's Sleep, Pale Sister

Abstract

Joanne Harris’s Sleep, Pale Sister (1994) is one of a growing number of neo-Victorian texts to foreground a concern with the female body and the male artist. Such tropes are reminiscent of the Victorian sensation novel, and indeed Harris’s text draws heavily on the plot of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Through an exploration of Harris’s novel, this article considers the role of the female body as objet d’art in neo-sensation fiction, contending that the artistic process represented provides a telling metaphor for the rewriting of the past in historical, and, more specifically, neo-Victorian fiction. I begin by examining the influence of Victorian sensation fiction on neo-Victorian writing, before exploring the representation of artists and their models in the two genres. I consider the extent to which Harris’s novel seeks to revise the power relations inherent in this relationship and empower the heroine, and the implications of this for the metaphor of creativity that emerges from a reading of the text.