‘The ghost I expected to see’: Vernon Lee, the Gothic, and the Spectrality of Perception

Abstract

Vernon Lee considered the conventional ghost story to be in rather bad taste and, in her own Gothic fiction, evoked ghosts that are never directly apprehended, but are perceived as agential bodies nonetheless. The distinctive ghosts that Lee creates haunt by exploiting the mechanisms of perception that she studied and theorised throughout her career. I analyse Lee’s depictions of perception in three stories, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, ‘Amour Dure’, and ‘The Image’, through the lens of philosopher Alva Noë’s theory of perception as ‘a kind of skilful bodily activity’. Noë argues that we make sense of the world by using our sensorimotor knowledge – ‘a knowledge of the way sensory stimulation varies as a function of movement’. Lee’s ghosts draw on this sensorimotor knowledge of characters and readers, allowing her to convey a potentiality for agency without depicting unambiguously supernatural events. Using mirror neuron studies and cognitive readings of how works of art transport their audiences into virtual environments, I argue that this sensorimotor engagement builds up a cognisance of Lee’s haunting figures as agential bodies that occupy space, acted upon by the material world and, in turn, acting upon it. Lee used these ghosts to adopt speculative perspectives on perception and cognition more broadly, such as questioning the stability and reliability of perception, and suggesting a loss of identity involved in all acts of perception. These perspectives are excluded from her studies and essays but are explored in the fictional space that the Gothic opens up; in her gothic stories, Lee exploits the uncanny aspects of cognition, suggesting and experimenting with queerer and more speculative theories than the objective studies she also pursued could accommodate.