The Uncanny Mother in Vernon Lee's "Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady"

Abstract

In her seminal study of the fantastic Rosemary Jackson observes that the genre traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ?absent'(4). It is precisely this revelatory power of the fantastic that has led, in recent years, to its recognition as an essential interpretive tool in critical reconsiderations of the Victorian canon.1 Victorian ghost stories, often the vehicle for meditations on the absence and exclusion of women and other marginalized subjects from main stream culture, reveal the shadowy areas around the edges of the realistic and scientific discourse that dominated the age. That Freud had early on intuited this dimension of the fantastic story is evident from his use of E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Sandman to explicate his thoughts regarding the origins of certain unsettling phenomena (repetition, coincidence, doubling) in The Uncanny. Like The Sandman, Prince and the Snake Lady2 explores uncon scious fears in early childhood, focusing on the fantastic visions that are called into existence when the child projects his fears onto the real world of social experience. But the unruly symbolism that com mingles male and female, East and West, past and present in Prince Alberic could never have provided Freud with a neat set of nar rative paradigms that would all fall 'naturally' into place behind his explanation of the constitution of the subject. According to Freud, fear of castration is the key to understanding the fantastic events in The Sandman and his characteristically compelling reading gives this thesis an aura of inevitability. Prince Alberic, in contrast, resists