Abstract
Writing about historical recollection and material culture, Elizabeth Edwards asserts that ‘photographs are perhaps the most ubiquitous and insistent focus of nineteenth- and twentieth-century memory’ (Edwards, 1999: 221). It is fitting, then, that many contemporary historical novelists return to the Victorian origins of photography to explore history, memory and the Victorian era.1 They dramatise the value that attaches to photography as a memorial medium, its promise, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning suggests in the epigraph above, to erase distance, to cheat time, and allow access to the past, the resuscitation of the dead. Their novels return to the inception of photography in the early Victorian period when it was greeted as a ghostly medium that could supplement memory, function as time’s receptacle, and pledge to remember in the face of loss. This chapter examines Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights and Helen Humphreys’ Afterimage, which exemplify the way in which, for many neo-Victorian novels, memory, history and fiction come together in the trope of the photograph. Employing a lexicon of haunting and spectral-ity to represent the photographic medium, Sixty Lights and Afterimage are concerned with recognising the persistence of the past in a present cut off from linear models of inheritance and memory, symbolised by the dead mother.
[I long] to have such a memorial of every being dear to me in the world. It is not merely the likeness which is precious in such cases — but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing … the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think — and it is not at all monstrous in me to say, what my brothers cry out against so vehemently, that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist’s work ever produced.
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a letter to Mary Russell Mitford, 1843)
Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight zone … All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photograph’s testify to time’s relentless melt.
(Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977)
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© 2010 Kate Mitchell
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Mitchell, K. (2010). ‘The alluring patina of loss’: Photography, Memory, and Memory Texts in Sixty Lights and Afterimage . In: History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283121_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283121_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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