1The publication of her first three novels, Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002), classified Sarah Waters as a neo-Victorian writer with the open agenda of tracing back the history of lesbianism to the late nineteenth century, when the existence of homosexual practices among women was rendered invisible by its sheer inconceivability. As Sarah Parker,2 drawing on Terry Castle3 recalls, this invisibility was sanctioned by the ‘Queen Victoria Principle,’ that is, the Queen’s famous refusal, in 1885, to sign the Criminal Law Amendment regarding homosexual behaviour until all references to women were removed because ‘she did not believe homosexual women existed.’4 The Queen’s blindness is representative of the dominant Victorians’ refusal to make the ideological leap needed to imagine lesbianism into existence. As a consequence, homosexual women were denied the possibility of rounding off their individuation process and condemned to lead an angst-ridden5 and ghostly—or in Terry Castle’s often repeated term, ‘apparitional’—existence at the margins of a patriarchal society ruled by compulsory heterosexuality. In Affinity, Waters takes this spectrality of lesbian women as the starting point for her elaboration of the difference, in the Victorian period, between humbleness, the property of being humble dictated by class and other external conditions for vulnerability, and humility, the characteristic of being and behaving egolessly, without pride, the virtuous modesty recommended by religion and expected of all women regardless of their social positions. In a period when the physical and intellectual inferiority of women was grounded on medical science and when their social value was determined by their marriageability and capacity for procreation, spinsterhood was considered unnatural and lesbian desire aberrant, the product of physical, moral, and mental degeneracy. Surrounded by a halo of derision and unspeakability, spinsters were often attributed male traits, irrespective of their sexual orientation, and associated with feeble-mindedness, hysteria and even madness. The differences between the spinster, the lesbian, and the lunatic were, therefore, difficult to establish, with the women thus categorised being forced into invisibility and self-erasure at the margin of society. Needless to say, the centre was reserved for the all-complying and ‘angelic’ women capable of fulfilling the social roles already enumerated by Samuel Richardson in 1740, in Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded.6 Pamela’s successive incarnations as dutiful child, spotless virgin and modest and amiable bride in the first Part, are rewarded in the second with her hypergamic ascent from lady’s maid to gentlewoman, after having reformed her master from amoral rake to protective husband. Thus, while Sally Godfrey, another socially humble girl Mr B. had seduced in his youth, had to emigrate to Jamaica, leaving behind an illegitimate child, Pamela’s display of the character and virtue of humility prescribed by the rising middle class allowed her to make the otherwise unimaginable leap from the invisible margin occupied by humble servants to the central space reserved for female members of the rural aristocracy.

2As Ian Watt explained in The Rise of the Novel,7 Richardson’s characterisation of his exemplary heroine was unprecedented in that it attributed middle-class moral values such as modesty, generosity and helplessness to a domestic servant, in sharp contrast to the traditional agency, resourcefulness and concupiscence attributed to poor women placed by society in conditions of extraordinary hardship by novelists writing in the older picaresque tradition, like Daniel Defoe or Henry Fielding. These women are humble in the sense that they are poor and therefore socially vulnerable but their character and behaviour are far from meeting the social and religious standards of female humility. As is well known, the incongruence between Pamela’s humble demeanour and her secret ambitions provoked the appearance of various parodies, includingAn Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andews (1741), published by Fielding under a pseudonym, in which Shamela behaves according to this picaresque tradition of the poor woman as an amoral social climber.

3For all this, it was Richardson’s characterisation of women in Pamela and Clarissa (as well as of men, on the model set by Sir Charles Grandison) that was to become normative throughout the Romantic and well into the Victorian periods, as this model answered to the craving for sentiment and the moralising propensity of the age. From this perspective, the fact that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh8 is overtly mentioned as a main intertext of Affinity becomes particularly significant, as the models both of males and females drawn in this mid-nineteenth century narrative poem represent a further turn in the same direction. Unlike Pamela, whose epic resistance to Mr B.’s attempts at seduction were motivated by the exorbitant market value she attributed to her virginity, the upper-class Aurora refuses the advantageous marriage proposal made by her amenable cousin, Romney Leigh, because he is condescending and dismissive of women’s intellectual and artistic capacities and she aspires to lead an independent life as a poet. Romney is a follower of Charles Fourier’s utopian ideas about social reform. Therefore, after being rejected by Aurora, he proposes matrimony to Marian Erle, one of the women in severe risk of social exclusion that he is trying to protect. Romney is representative of the self-humbling male hero in the tradition stemming from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson’s benevolent theory of morals, that was inaugurated by Sir Charles Grandison and continued by characters like Lord Orville, in Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778), or Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice (1813), a young Lord struggling between his class pride and his self-effacing character and benevolent behaviour. The fact that these male characters voluntarily renounce their heightened social position, while humility is an enforced female virtue, is a clear example of gender inequality sanctioned by the double standard of morality.

4Although everything is ready, Romney and Marian’s wedding never takes place due to the scheming of jealous Lady Waldemar, who convinces Marian that she is not good enough for him and sends her to a brothel in Paris, where she is drugged and raped in an episode that harks back to Richardson’s Clarissa. Her attempt at earning a living as a lady’s maid is frustrated by her pregnancy, so that when Aurora encounters her, Marian is leading the precarious life of a single mother. It is at this point that the free-thinking lady and the humble servant decide to start living together with the child in Florence. This arrangement is striking not only because it erases the class boundary separating ladies from maids but also because it materialises a self-sustaining, only-women nuclear family structure. Still, the arrangement only lasts until, in an ending reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and also possibly forerunning that of E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), the now blind Romney finds Aurora and they confess their love to each other. Thus, although the poem asserts the capacity for independent intellectual work of the aristocratic protagonist, and although it provides a hopeful alternative to the traditional dreary fate of disgraced maidservants, the eventual adoption of the conventional ‘happy ending’ of Romantic and Victorian fiction deprives Aurora Leigh of much of its transgressive potential.

5In Affinity, Waters gives an overtly lesbian profile to the affective relations developing between Miss Margaret Prior, an upper-class closeted lesbian spinster in her thirties, and the working-class Selina Dawes, a spirit-medium currently serving a five-year sentence at Millbank Prison for fraud and assault. From the start, Margaret is closely associated with Barrett Browning, her heroine, and even Romney. Like Aurora Leigh, Miss Prior learnt to love books from her father and to prefer intellectual occupations to the social roles traditionally allotted to unmarried ladies. Like Romney, she held philanthropic ideas about the role of the upper-class with respect to the poor. Her occupation as Lady Visitor to Millbank Prison signals her as a follower of the Quaker Elizabeth Fry, whose ‘writings on Newgate’ she reads at the British Museum, together with ‘Matthew’s book on the prisons of London.’9 During her first talk with ‘Dawes,’ the Lady Visitor says that she ‘had come to Millbank to make friends of all the women’ (Waters 44), a statement rendered ironic by the ruse played on her by the spirit-medium, which points both to the lonely lady’s unguarded philanthropy and to an unconscious class bias which, as Anne Schwan notes, shows ‘Waters challeng [ing] the humanitarian rhetoric of nineteenth century prison visiting.’10 Finally, Margaret led a life of seclusion and solitude motivated by a depressive condition, while Barrett Browning suffered from a chronic illness that, according to Virginia Woolf, had done the author of ‘Aurora Leigh’ irreparable damage as a writer and had forced her to live ‘shut off, guessing at what was outside, and inevitably magnifying what was within.’11 This description might also be applied to Margaret Prior, as she spent most of her lonely life brooding over her closeted lesbian condition and guessing at what might be waiting for her outside. As the reading of her evermore introspected and emotionally charged journal makes clear, the development of the action wholly depends on the forlorn lady’s growing magnification of the imaginary alternatives opened to her by her meeting of Selina.

6Before her father’s death Margaret had been planning a trip to Italy with him and Helen, her secret lover, in a thinly disguised attempt to imitate Aurora Leigh and Marian Erle. The enthusiasm with which Margaret planned this journey led Helen to call her ‘Aurora’ (Waters 187), a nickname Selina will also use in her most intimate exchanges with her (Waters 114–115). Indeed, Margaret’s growing obsessiveness with Barrett Browning was so obvious that even her mother attributed her daughter’s odd behaviour to the poet’s influence. On one of the many occasions when Margaret infuriated her with her refusal to perform some expected social duty, Mrs Prior ‘almost spat the words at [her]. “You are not Mrs Browning, Margaret—as much as you would like to be.”’ (Waters 252–253). Needless to say, Margaret did not like the conventional happy ending of Aurora Leigh. After Mrs Prior asked her to read out to her ‘the part where Romney returns—poor man—so scarred and blinded,’ Margaret wrote: ‘but I wouldn’t do that. I think I shall never read that part again. I read her Book Seven, which has Aurora’s speeches to Marian Erle’ (Waters 287).

7In Aurora Leigh, the bookish lady and the humble servant told their life stories to each other after their chance encounter in Paris and this allowed them to dispel the false assumptions they had made about their respective pasts and to project a happy future together. Echoing this, Affinity alternates the first-person accounts of the two protagonists. But, instead of addressing each other and thus creating a dialogic space of mutual understanding, Margaret’s and Selina’s narrations take the form of journals, that is, of privately written daily records of their respective experiences, occurrences and observations, meant to be read only by themselves. Their implicit monologism reproduces, at the narrative level, the socio-cultural divide separating Margaret Prior, the Lady Visitor, from Selina Dawes, the working-class convict, and is crucial for the development of the action, which wholly depends on Margaret’s gullibility, her readiness to believe in the supernatural phenomena created by Selina to captivate her. This gullibility gives an ironic dimension to the relative positions of the class-proud Lady Visitor and the humble convict that prefigures its eventual reversal leading to the revelation of Selina’s picaresque character and behaviour and to the lady’s pitiless humbling.

8Margaret’s evolution from scepticism to belief in Selina’s supernatural powers echoes both Aurora Leigh’s ‘relations in the Unseen’ (vol. I, n. p.) and Barrett Browning’s belief in the transcendental aspect of spiritualism, in sharp contrast to Robert Browning’s sarcastic scepticism. As Alison Chapman explains, on 25 July 1855, the Brownings attended a séance at the Ealing home of the Rhymers organised by the celebrated medium Daniel Dunglas Home (or Hume), which ended with the materialisation of the spirit of their twelve-year old dead child, ‘Wat,’ ‘tugging Elizabeth’s skirt and manifesting a hand.’ After Elizabeth moved next to Hume, ‘a larger hand appeared and placed a wreath on her head.’12 While she was half persuaded that this larger hand belonged to Dante, as Hume later affirmed, Robert Browning thought that ‘the two hands were made by Mr. Hume and fastened to Mr. Hume’s toes, and that he made them move by moving his feet’ (Chapman 78).13 According to the critic Daniel Karlin, most disgusting of all for Robert Browning were the poet’s degradation and ‘Home’s social and sexual ambivalence, his tone of emotional aggression, [. . .] his strident, self-proclaimed weakness, [and] his aping of filial and erotic bonds’ (in Chapman 79).14

9The incident, echoed in Affinity in the repeated allusions to Selina’s spirit-control’s big and rough hands (Waters 141, 188), illustrates the division among Victorians about the credibility of spiritualism and, most importantly, the association of this type of séances with social and sexual ambivalence and with emotional aggression, two salient traits of the private séances in Affinity. Margaret’s progressive conversion to spiritualism, her conviction that Selina’s spirit could flee out of prison and enter her bedroom in order to leave her presents or take away objects, and that, thanks to the power of their spiritual ‘affinity,’ she would eventually be able to help Selina transfer even her body out of prison, are propelled by the force of her repressed sexual desire, and the possibility of realising at last her wish-fulfilment dream of unbounded love and freedom by travelling to Italy with Selina under the names of Aurora Leigh and Marian Erle (Waters 303).

10The novel is divided into five Parts, containing the entries of both journals in chronological order and alternating with each other, with the only exception of Selina’s last entry, which appears at the beginning of the novel, before Part One. This arrangement gives a false sense of simultaneity to the events narrated in each journal, as that of Selina begins two years before meeting Margaret, and ends one year before Margaret begins hers. This means that, in fact, readers learn about the meeting of the two protagonists, the development of their intimacy and the events that led to Selina’s breaking out of prison exclusively through Margaret’s journal. This restriction in perspective, which is crucial for the maintenance of suspense, is added to by the differences in extension and scope of the two journals.

11In her excellent analysis of the Victorian intertexts of Affinity, Tatiana Kontou15 singles out Susan Willis Fletcher’s Twelve Months in an English Prison (1884), the memoir written by an American spirit-medium after being convicted of fraud.16 As Kontou argues, there are striking thematic similarities in the description of the prison, the trial and the scandal provoked by the association made by mainstream newspapers between spiritualism and free sex (Kontou 176). What is more, Sarah Waters herself admitted to Kontou that ‘she was delighted to have found this book when she was researching material for writing Affinity’ (Kontou 217 n. 8). However, from a formal perspective, Mrs Fletcher’s memoir is very different from Selina’s journal, since, as Kontou herself admits, ‘[t] hough ostensibly a factual memoir, Twelve Months resembles the popular melodramatic novels of the 1860s and 70s with its narrative of imprisonment and redemption’ (Kontou 177). In contrast to the theatrical and sensational embellishments of Mrs Fletcher’s memoir (Kontou 177), Selina’s journal is extraordinarily laconic and factual, evincing an illiteracy that responds to her humble social position. Its chronological first entry simply contains alternative wordings for an advertisement of herself as a spirit-medium, while the second is little more than a list of clients and the money they paid for each visit, with short memo-like records of their ailments and queries. The succinctness, factuality, and importance given to money in the first entries of Selina’s journal points to it as the type of pocket diary or memorandum created in the eighteenth century for women to keep track of daily observations and cash expenditures, like, for example, the writer Jane Porter’s The Ladies Memorandum Book, for the Year 1796, kept at the Folger Shakespeare Library.17 Daniel Defoe enhanced the credibility of his novel Moll Flanders (1722) by ending its full title with the observation: ‘Written from her own Memorandums,’ thus associating this type of journal with his prototype of the resourceful and materialistic poor woman forced to fend for herself. However, just as Moll’s memorandums become the source of endless adventures, so the initial factuality and succinctness of the entries in Selina’s pocket book progressively give way to longer and rather enigmatic comments, especially from 26 January 1873 onwards (Waters 192–195), when a spirit-control called ‘Peter Quick’18 starts participating in the dark circles organised by Selina at Mrs Brink’s house and provoking strange reactions from the participants, particularly from young ladies. The climax of tension and unrest is reached in the last entry, dated on 3 August 1873 (Waters 1–4), which is precisely the entry that opens the novel. It contains Selina’s confused and panic-stricken description of a fifteen-year old American lady, Madeleine Silvester, having a nervous breakdown provoked by Peter Quick’s intervention, and of Selina’s protector, Mrs Brink, seeing something so shocking that she had a heart attack and died soon after. It is because of this and the suspicion of improper behaviour during the séance that Selina is incarcerated on charges of fraud and assault, while Peter Quick disappears without a trace. When Miss Silvester’s maid entered the dark room, she saw the young lady ‘in a waking swoon, with her clothes very dishevelled, and marks of violence upon her face and throat’ (Waters 138). This is what Mrs Brink also saw, together with Selina’s torn petticoat and bleeding hands, and Peter Quick shying away from the light, ‘his hands before his face’ and his gown open, revealing ‘his white legs’ (2). As readers eventually learn, what had startled Mrs Brink was her realisation that Peter Quick was the male impersonation of Ruth Vigers, the maid she had given over to the care of Selina when the spirit-medium moved in with her (Waters 155).

12The fact that Selina’s last entry is printed before the five Parts containing the other entries of both journals, and that her last but one entry closes Part V and the novel as a whole suggests that Selina’s diary has an all-encompassing circular structure and is situated at a higher diegetic level than that of Margaret. But this suggestion can only make sense if we admit that the privacy of Margaret’s journal has been violated, that either Selina or someone else has had access to both journals, has started reading the last entry of Selina’s diary and has then continued reading the rest chronologically and alternatively. This possibility acts as a proleptic warning of the centrality, for the development of the action, of a third character, Ruth Vigers, the maid addressed by Selina as ‘Ruth’ and by Margaret as ‘Vigers,’ whose presence in both diaries is rendered doubly invisible by her condition as a humble servant and an apparitional lesbian. After Selina’s imprisonment, Ruth Vigers was inadvertently hired by Mrs Prior to replace Ellis, Margaret’s lady’s maid, who had suddenly resigned after declaring that the house was haunted. Neither Margaret nor her mother paid any attention to this strange behaviour of a competent and reliable maid and they cared nothing for her future. Their lack of interest is representative of the general incapacity of the upper class to see the human being behind the servant. This class blindness is the pivot around which the most secretive and spectral part of Selina’s scheme to captivate Margaret develops, as it granted Ruth Vigers a ghostliness that both literalises and metaphorises the invisibility of humble servants, allowing her both to get in and out of rooms unobserved, and to impersonate Selina’s spirit-control, Peter Quick, without being recognised. Thus, after scaring Ellis away and occupying her post, Vigers could enter Margaret’s bedroom, put in or take away objects from it and, most importantly, have free access to the intimate secrets poured by Miss Prior in her journal. The eventual revelation of the humble servant’s pivotal role in the development of the action projects an ironic shadow on Margaret’s narration from its very beginning, when, after wondering where her father would have begun her journal and, after considering the possibility of beginning it ‘at seven this morning when Ellis first brought me my grey suit and my coat,’ she concluded: ‘no, of course, he would not start the story there, with a lady and her servant, and petticoats and loose hair’ (Waters 7).

13During her visits to the prison, Margaret carries with her ‘a note-book’ (Waters 111) of the memorandum type, intended, as she confides to Selina, to take down notes for a diary, which ‘was like my dearest friend. I told it all my closest thoughts and it kept them secret’ (111). As this description suggests, Margaret’s diary belongs in the tradition of the private lady’s diary that Miss Gwilt in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale qualified as ‘this secret friend of my wretchedest and wickedest hours,’ prompted by what she described as ‘a woman’s misery, [that] will speak—here, rather than nowhere; to my second self.’19 It is this diary, then, rather than Selina’s memorandum, that is stylistically indebted to Susan Willis Fletcher’s memoir. The fact that Miss Prior’s is the sort of intimate diary many unhappy ladies kept to assuage their loneliness and put their most secret frustrations and hopes into words gives an additional emotional charge to the potential violation of its secrets by Vigers, the apparently humble but really assertive and unscrupulous, picaresque servant.

14Margaret’s diary begins on 24 September 1794, when Selina is already in prison, and ends on an unrecorded date, after 21 January 1795. She starts writing it a few days after having accepted the proposal made by the director of Millbank Prison, Mr Shillitoe, to act as Lady Visitor to the women interned in it for various offences, including suicide attempts (Waters 23). At this stage, Miss Prior is recovering from a deep depression and suicide attempt overtly attributed to her incapacity to cope with the recent death of her father, but really caused by Helen’s decision, caved under social pressure, to put an end to their lesbian relation and marry Stephen, Margaret’s brother. Margaret is perfectly aware that she has avoided prison because she is a gentlewoman and, although she does not question the ethicality of her privileges, she cannot help identifying with some of the inmates. Thus, during her first visit to the infirmary, one of the matrons, Mrs Wheeler, tells Margaret that (‘the prisoners will “try any sort of trick” to get themselves admitted to the ward’ (Waters 61), and that they might do it even ‘purely to create a little stir with herself at its centre’ (Waters 62). The ensuing comment Margaret writes in her diary reads: ‘Of course I did not tell her that I had once tried a similar “trick” myself’ (Waters 62). Besides confirming the readers’ suspicion that it was Helen’s wedding, rather than the death of her father, that led Margaret to take an overdose of ‘morphia’ (255–256), the admission that she wanted to create a stir with herself ‘at the centre,’ a typical behaviour of hysterics, points to the forlorn lady’s desperate need for love and attention. Needless to say, Helen’s wedding to Margaret’s brother repeats the conventional ‘happy ending’ of Aurora Leigh and Romney, with the difference that, in Waters’s version, it is the lady nicknamed Aurora, instead of Marian/Helen, that is sacrificed to patriarchy’s enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality.

15Her troubled mental condition and the impossibility of sharing her sorrow with others made the Lady Visitor an ideal dupe for the picaresque couple formed by Selina Dawes and Ruth Vigers. Before moving to Mrs Brink’s house and meeting Ruth, Selina had been leading a precarious life as a spirit-medium, especially after the death of her aunt, her only relative. Selina’s great surprise when Peter Quick made his first appearance suggests that it was Ruth who had the idea of cross-dressing and impersonating a male spirit-control. Ruth had been working for Mrs Brink for six years, since she became a widow. So, she had witnessed the old lady’s repeated attempts to get in contact with her dead mother, and to learn the tricks employed by various spirit-mediums to increase her suggestibility and take her money. What is more, Selina’s description of Peter Quick’s behaviour leaves no doubt that he assumed a leading role during the spiritualist sessions. When, on his first appearance, Mrs Brink asked Selina who was inside the cabinet with her, ‘he bent & put his mouth very close to [her] ear, saying “Say I am your master.” So [Selina] said it’ (Waters 193). This domineering attitude contrasts with Ruth Vigers’s social invisibility when she is playing the role of humble servant. The first time Selina met Ruth she gave the spirit-medium a terrible shock as she turned around and found a woman standing at the door looking at her, before realising that: ‘it was only Mrs Brink’s maid, Ruth. She had come quietly, [. . .] like a real lady’s maid, like a ghost’ (Waters 119). In the light of our contemporary association of spectrality with lesbianism, Selina’s words add an ironic element to the invisibility of well-trained maids that calls into question the dominant Victorians’ assumption not only of their social humbleness and innate female humility but also of their heterosexuality.

16After Peter Quick started participating in the séances Selina became celebrated for exerting a beneficial influence ‘in the alleviation of certain indispositions and complaints [. . . s]uch as weakness, nervousness and aches’ of ladies like Madeleine Silvester, who ‘were spiritually sensitive [. . .] but needed their powers developing’ (Waters 145). As Selina explains in her deposition, the healing treatment required the removal of ‘certain articles of clothing,’ ‘the laying on of hands,’ and a certain amount of ‘[r]ubbing and shampooing’ (Waters 145). In other words, hysterical young ladies were submitted to sessions of sexual magic. As the title of the novel suggests, this practice was based on Emmanuel Swedenborg’s mid-eighteenth-century doctrine of spiritual affinity and his contention that carnal love is holy because it is ‘the first step on the ladder to the true love of God.’20 As Selina confides to Margaret, the souls of some human beings are connected by an affinity that forces them to seek each other both in this world and beyond. Therefore, when we die ‘we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same’ (Waters 210). As Hugh B. Urban explains, in the mid-nineteenth century, the influence of Swedenborg and the new interest in the occult, séances and mediumship in the United States, materialised in the appearance of Spiritualism, a loosely organised radical movement, often tied to social and racial reform, with strong affinities to feminism and the doctrine of free love (Urban 62). Susan Willis Fletcher was, as we have seen, a notable representative of this trend. Yet another was Ida C. Craddock (1857–1902), the American free thinker and defender of women’s rights who wrote numerous tracts on erotic mysticism based on her own experience with an angel.21 Yet another practitioner of erotic mysticism was the already mentioned Scottish spiritualist D. D. Home (1833–1886), while in the hands of the English occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), spiritual affinity developed into the more controversial theory of ‘Sex Magick.’ As Urban explains, ‘Crowley identified sex as the most powerful force in life and the supreme source of magical power’ and he deliberately enjoyed outraging the prudish society of his time by ‘making explicit use of the most “deviant” acts’ (Urban 109). Crowley’s practice may be said to culminate the deviant and transgressive tendency already at work in Selina and Peter Quick’s sessions of sexual magic.22

17As readers of Affinity eventually learn, Selina and Peter Quick’s séances were aimed at liberating hysterical women like Madeleine Silvester, or, even more clearly, Miss Isherwood (Waters 262), of their sexual repression and at realising the ladies’ and their own homosexual fantasies. Selina’s torn petticoat and bleeding hands (from the lacerations provoked by the tight ropes Peter Quick had tied around her wrists), and Madeleine’s bruised face and hysterical fit suggest that the spirit-control was playing the dominant role in a sadomasochistic game meant not only to fulfil Ruth Vigers’s fantasy as the active partner in a lesbian ménage à trois, but, most crucially, to subvert the social roles traditionally allotted to ladies and maids, both during the séances and in her daily relation with Selina. The spirit-medium herself provides evidence of Ruth’s active subversion of these roles when she comments that when her maid brushed her hair, she made her cry with pain. Then she said: ‘“Fancy crying over a brush!” She stood and laughed, & then she brushed again a little harder. She said she would give me a 100 strokes, she made me count them’ (Waters 175).

18In her analysis of the figure of Selina Dawes, Esther Peeren argues that her isolation from the other inmates at Millbank Prison evinces the association Victorian working-class women made between female mediums and ‘“spooks,” which are clearly to be feared’ (Pereen 110). However, as is suggested by Selina’s shocked reaction to Ruth’s sudden appearance behind her the first time they met, the truly spooky character in the novel is not Selina but her maid. According to Peeren, this association of the female medium with the spooky-as-scary is both empowering and enigmatic, as the medium’s ‘promise to facilitate communication with the dead allows her to simultaneously compel and repel’ (Pereen 112). Again, this is precisely the contradictory effect Peter Quick—whose ‘spirit-name is Irresistible’ (Waters 193)— invariably provokes in the onlooker, pointing to a reversal of the conventionally humble and liminal ontological status of the ghost into a figure of empowerment paradoxically built on the powers of vulnerability. Further, the attractiveness of his condition as spirit-control, or mediator and gatekeeper between the two worlds, is constantly set into question by his grotesque, pantomimic aspect—‘his great arms, his black whiskers, his red lips’ (Waters 193, emphasis in the original), evocative of music-hall transvestism. This theatrical element of Peter Quick’s apparitions is in keeping with what Tatiana Kontou describes as ‘a deep connection between professional actresses and spirits, between the séance and the stage’ (Kontou 24) in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, when both become privileged transgressive spaces offering women the possibility of personal and social improvement and the impersonation or ‘possession’ of characters different from themselves (28). The illusionist ambiguity created by transvestism both in popular theatre and in the séance has the subversive potentiality of the carnivalesque, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of the term,23 as it challenges the social and sexual discourses of patriarchy and opens up a space for the representation of alternative forms of social and sexual relations, backed, in the case of the séance, by the assumption that, as Selina tells Margaret, spirits are neither men nor women, but ‘both’ and exist ‘in a world without distinctions [. . .] a world that is made of love’ (Waters 210, emphasis in the original).

19The fact that Selina was living under Mrs Brink’s roof when the shocking episode with Madeleine Silvester took place proves that she had already made the difficult climb from picaresque working-class orphan to lady-like protégée of a wealthy lady who believed her dead mother to communicate with her through Selina’s body. The extent of Mrs Brink’s gullibility and munificence points to the affective void spirit-mediums could fill in melancholy women who had failed to round off the process of mourning24 and pined for contact with their beloved dead. Another telling example is the kindly matron Mrs Jelf, who was lured into facilitating Selina’s break out of prison on the promise that she would get her in contact with her dead son (Waters 329). From Julia Kristeva’s post-Freudian perspective, Mrs Brink’s inexhaustible grief for the loss of her mother situates her on a par with Chrysothemis, the archetype of the ‘mother’s daughter’ alienated by her passively clinging to her mother. Chrysothemis stands in opposition to her sister Electra, the archetype of the ‘father’s daughter’ whose defining trait is an even more alienating ‘hatred of the mother, or more precisely, hatred of her jouissance.’25 According to Kristeva, during the Œdipal phase, the girl finds herself faced with a choice similar to that of the boy: either she identifies with the mother, or she raises herself to the symbolic stature of the father. In the first case, the pre-Œdipal stages (oral and anal eroticism) are intensified, but are ‘not superseded by female homosexuality,’ as ‘[b]y giving herself a male object (a substitute for her father) she desires and appropriates him for herself’ (Kristeva 148–149). In the second case, identification with the father, ‘the girl represses the oral-sadistic stage, and at the same time represses the vagina and the possibility of finding someone else as her partner’ (Kristeva 149). The result of this choice is female homosexuality.

20In the novel, the first option is presented by Mrs Brink’s morbid attachment to her mother, dead forty years before, when she was a little girl, and intensified after the death of her husband. Selina makes clear that the relation she has with Mrs Brink as spirit-medium has nothing to do with lesbianism. As a rule, the old lady, speaking through Selina with her mother, regresses to her childhood and asks her mother for kisses. Then Selina responds by kissing ‘only her eyes & cheeks, never her mouth,’ while ‘all the time Ruth sits and watches. But she does not touch me [Selina]’ (Waters 174). When Mrs Brink ‘has had her 30 kisses she sighs, then she puts her arms about me, her head against her mother’s bosom’ (Waters 174). As this description suggests, Mrs Brink’s sexuality responds to the intensification of oral eroticism characteristic of the pre-Œdipal stage. This would explain the extremity of her shocked reaction to the discovery of the true nature of the ‘treatment’ applied to Madeleine Silvester by Peter Quick and Selina.

21In contrast to Mrs Brink, Ruth’s alternatively domineering and humble behaviour responds to Kristeva’s archetype of the ‘father’s daughter,’ characterised by the violent repression of the oral-sadistic stage:

In her imagination, the girl obtains a real or imaginary penis for herself; the imaginary acquisition of the male organ seems here to be less important than the access she gains to the symbolic mastery which is necessary to censor the pre-Œdipal stage and wipe out all trace of dependence on the mother’s body. (Kristeva 149)

22As Kristeva argues, the ‘vigilant war’ the lesbian wages against her pre-Œdipal dependence on the mother keeps her from discovering her own body as other: ‘Melancholy—fear of aphanisis—punctuated by sudden bursts of energy marks the loss of the maternal body, this immediate investment of sadism in the symbolic’ (Kristeva 149).

23Ironically enough, since she becomes the victim of the picaresque couple formed by Selina and Ruth, the other female character in the novel whose behaviour responds to the archetype of the mother-hating ‘father’s daughter’ is Margaret Prior. When her father was alive, Margaret led a full intellectual life reading poetry and collaborating with him in his scholarly research while at the same time she secretly enjoyed a fulfilling lesbian relationship with Helen. As we know, she had planned a trip to Italy with both of them that would have crowned this perfect arrangement. But Helen’s betrayal, coupled with the untimely death of Mr Prior, put an abrupt end to this project. Her new journal, replacing the one she had burnt after losing Helen, overtly intended to record her work as Lady Visitor to Millbank Prison, was in fact a healing narrative, aimed at fighting her overpowering melancholia and fear of losing sexual desire.

24At this stage, Margaret is not yet, technically speaking, a spinster. She becomes so only when her younger sister Priscilla marries a dreamlike suitor, only one day after the official two years of mourning for her father. This marriage was doubly painful for Margaret, firstly because the couple chose Italy for their honeymoon and secondly because, as Margaret reflects, while her social status did not change after her brother married Helen, Priscilla’s wedding completely changed her position within the familial and social structure, transforming her from her ‘mother’s burden’ to ‘her consolation’ (Waters 199, emphasis in the original), that is, from still marriageable woman past her prime to spinster. At this point, Margaret had already set fire to her secret journal and was writing a last page before proceeding to kill herself:

This is the last page I shall write. All my book is burned now. I have built a fire in the grate and set the pages on it, and when this sheet is filled with staggering lines it shall be added to the others. How queer, to write for chimney smoke! But I must write, while I still breathe. (Waters 348)

25Recounted in the manner of Richardson’s ‘instantaneous’ writing,26 this last entry provides Margaret’s journal with an uncanny circularity as its burning and her projected suicide repeat the burning of her earlier journal and her earlier suicide attempt.

26At this stage, Margaret has become aware at last that she has been the dupe of an elaborate plan aimed at luring her into facilitating Selina’s break out of prison and escape to Italy with Ruth Vigers, her real lover and fellow trickster. Margaret’s tragic class blindness and pride contrast with the readers’ growing suspicion of unreliability (and, therefore, amorality) of the picaresque couple, which, as Mariaconcetta Costantini notes, reaches a climax at the end of the novel, when ‘Ruth’s cynical laughter [at the mention of Selina’s Guardian spirit, Peter Quick] contaminates the medium’s spiritualism and undermines the credibility of all her entries.’27 Thus, while the alternation of the two diaries provides a dialogical dimension to the events narrated that is in fact minimised by the chronological gap between their writing, the fact that the attentive readers can gauge at least to a certain extent the unreliability of Selina’s discourse while Margaret cannot, creates both an ironic tension that increases the suspense as the action moves towards its inevitable tragic end, and a growing sense of empathetic foreboding on Margaret’s desperate attempts to liberate herself from the social conventions enforced on her by her punitive mother and her uncomprehending family and friends, which had already cost her the loss of Helen and had turned her into a recluse in her family home, an opium addict, and a potential suicide, now getting ready for a second attempt.

27Thus, the novel ends establishing a striking contrast between, on the one hand, the tragic blindness of the class-proud Margaret Prior, who, for all her attempts at modeling her character and behaviour according to the moral virtues of humility and benevolence, cannot see the human being behind her humble servant; and, on the other, the success of the resourceful and amoral working-class pícaras, Selina Dawes and Ruth Vigers, for whom humbleness is the social mask that can grant them the literal and metaphorical invisibility they need to transform their vulnerability into a source of power. Miss Prior’s incapacity to break out of the immaterial prisonhouse of familial and social conventions while Selina and Ruth initiate a new life of freedom, sexual fulfilment, and social ascent, points to class as the decisive blocking element in Margaret’s quest for individuation. However, although her impending suicide provides a chilling picture of the physical and psychical traumas affecting upper-class lesbian women in the Victorian period, it should not be forgotten that Selina is the only convict who manages to break out of Millbank, a tenebrous Gothic prison, designed after Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon so as to keep all inmates potentially under constant surveillance by an unseen official.28 This awe-inspiring picture of the disciplinary mechanisms reserved for poor women in the Victorian era provides the counterpoint to the portrait of the Lady Visitor’s tragic fate. When both pictures are set against each other, it becomes evident that the difference in the punitive and disciplinary treatment of transgressive working-class and upper-class Victorian women was more apparent than real, a simple difference in the materiality or immateriality of the cell they were respectively condemned to inhabit. In the last reading, therefore, Ruth’s double invisibility as a humble lady’s maid and as an apparitional lesbian may be seen as representative of the general condition of late nineteenth-century working-class women forced to fend for themselves in a thoroughly hostile and pitiless patriarchal word. It is against this oppressive background that the ethicality of Selina and Ruth’s self-humbling tactics as a means to accomplish their picaresque quest for freedom and social ascent should be measured.