British literature and archaeology, 1880–1930 9781526161482

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British literature and archaeology, 1880–​1930

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Series editors: Anna Barton, Andrew Smith Editorial board: David Amigoni, Isobel Armstrong, Philip Holden, Jerome McGann, Joanne Wilkes, Julia M. Wright Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century seeks to make a significant intervention into the critical narratives that dominate conventional and established understandings of nineteenth-​century literature. Informed by the latest developments in criticism and theory the series provides a focus for how texts from the long nineteenth century, and more recent adaptations of them, revitalise our knowledge of and engagement with the period. It explores the radical possibilities offered by new methods, unexplored contexts, and neglected authors and texts to re-​map the literary-​cultural landscape of the period and rigorously re-​imagine its geographical and historical parameters. The series includes monographs, edited collections, and scholarly sourcebooks. Already published Engine of modernity: The omnibus and urban culture in nineteenth-​century Paris Masha Belenky Spectral Dickens: The uncanny forms of novelistic characterization   Alexander Bove The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction   Rob Breton Dante beyond influence: Rethinking reception in Victorian literary culture   Federica Coluzzi Worlding the south: Nineteenth-​century literary culture and the southern settler colonies Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis (eds) Pasts at play: Childhood encounters with history in British culture, 1750–​1914 Rachel Bryant Davies and Barbara Gribling (eds) The Case of the Initial Letter: Charles Dickens and the politics of the dual alphabet Gavin Edwards Spain in the nineteenth century: New essays on experiences of culture and society Andrew Ginger and Geraldine Lawless (eds) Instead of modernity: The Western canon and the incorporation of the Hispanic (c. 1850–​75)    Andrew Ginger The Victorian aquarium: Literary discussions on nature, culture, and science Silvia Granata Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian cartoonist Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin and Julian Waite Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction Helena Ifill Margaret Harkness: Writing social engagement 1880–​1921 Flore Janssen and Lisa C. Robertson (eds) Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–​1915: Re-​reading the fin de siècle    Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells and Minna Vuohelainen (eds) Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and afterlives    Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne (eds) Madrid on the move: Feeling modern and visually aware in the nineteenth century Vanesa Rodríguez-​Galindo The Great Exhibition, 1851: A sourcebook   Jonathon Shears (ed.) Interventions: Rethinking the nineteenth century    Andrew Smith and Anna Barton (eds) Counterfactual Romanticism    Damian Walford Davies (ed.) The poems of Elizabeth Siddal in context   Anne Woolley

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British literature and archaeology, 1880–​1930 Angie Blumberg

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Angie Blumberg 2022 The right of Angie Blumberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 6147 5 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: ‘Go Seek’, illustration from Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, 1894, illustrated and decorated by Charles Ricketts. Courtesy of The University of Virginia Library (PR5820 .S6 1894).

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Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: ‘Our real life in tombs’ 1 2 3 4

Queer archaeologies Archaeology and Decadent prose Archaeology and authenticity Our real life in tombs: Great War archaeology

page vi vii 1 26 82 138 176

CODA: Archaeology from a distance

236

Bibliography Index

240 254

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Illustrations

1.1 Panel Portrait of a Man—​from the Fayum in Egypt, late first century CE. (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.) page 30 1.2 Frontispiece, Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, 1894, illustrated and decorated by Charles Ricketts. 50 1.3 Illustration, ‘Go Seek’, Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, 1894, illustrated and decorated by Charles Ricketts. 52 1.4 Illustration, ‘And Nilus’, Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, 1894, illustrated and decorated by Charles Ricketts. 53 1.5 Illustration draft, ‘Rose up the painted swathed dead’, for Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, by Charles Ricketts, second series, 1923. 54 3.1 ‘Bogus Antiquities: The Manufacture of Sham Works of Art’, The Sketch, Wednesday 20 September, 1905, p. 376. 161 4.1 Paul Nash, The Pyramids in the Sea, 1912. (Tate, London, UK.) 182 4.2 Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918. (Imperial War Museum, London, UK. ©Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM ART 1146).) 187 4.3 Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919. (Imperial War Museum, London, UK. ©Imperial War Museum (Art.IWM ART 2242).) 188 4.4 Paul Nash, ‘Funeral Pyre’, illustration for Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus, edited by John Carter, 1932. (Washington University in St. Louis (MO, USA), Special Collections.) 191 4.5 Paul Nash, ‘Tokens’, illustration for Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus, edited by John Carter, 1932. (Washington University in St Louis (MO, USA), Special Collections.) 193 4.6 Paul Nash, ‘Ghosts’, illustration for Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus, edited by John Carter, 1932. (Washington University in St Louis (MO, USA), Special Collections.) 195

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Acknowledgements

I am truly grateful to teachers of many varieties for their role in supporting this book. Thank you to Ellen Crowell for guiding me through its earliest stages, both sharing and inspiring enthusiasm for the work and its possibilities. I am grateful to Phyllis Weliver for her longstanding mentorship and support, and to Anne Stiles for her feedback on early portions of the work. I also want to acknowledge a 2016 Mellon summer seminar—​Wartime: The Great War and the Historiography of Modernism—​at Washington University in St Louis, led by Vincent Sherry, whose conversation, guidance, and scholarship have been immensely valuable in my study of the Great War. Thank you to Heather Bozant Witcher for her friendship and advice over the last several years, and for modelling true collegiality. Thank you also to Geoff Brewer for forgery conversations over cocktails, and for recommending some of the material addressed in my third chapter. Finally, I must thank my first teachers—​my parents—​for their steadfast support and encouragement, and Jayce, for believing in me and indulging my passion for the research. There are also several institutions and organisations that have aided this book in key ways. I am grateful to the English Department, Saint Louis University for supporting the work in its earliest stages, and to the English Department at Auburn University for supporting me through the rest of its development. Finally, thank you to the DePaul Humanities Center and the lovely group of interdisciplinary researchers with whom in 2018 I was able to explore the theme of the Fake.

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Introduction: ‘Our real life in tombs’

In late November 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter made a small hole in the corner of a subterranean doorway beneath the sands of Egypt. After performing the necessary tests, ‘as a precaution against possible foul gases’, he widened the hole slightly, ‘inserted the candle and peered in’.1 In The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen (1923), Carter (along with his collaborator Arthur Mace) narrates what follows, as his patron Lord Carnarvon, his colleague Arthur Callender, and Carnarvon’s daughter Evelyn wait beside him: At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—​everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment—​an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by—​I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ it was all I could do to get out the words, ‘Yes, wonderful things’.2

Carter’s depiction of this moment—​ in which he witnesses for the first time the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb, glimmering in the unsteady candlelight—​has become one of the most famous narratives of archaeological encounter. The artefacts concealed in the tomb ‘[emerge] slowly from the mist’, as if arising into the present from the shadowy past itself. Carter imagines that those who wait beside him experience ‘an eternity’ in this moment, as if he and they suddenly occupy different temporalities—​Carter with a view of, and an arm in, the ancient past, and the others planted in the present, anxiously hoping to hear what he sees. The shock to the senses and to temporality embeds itself in the form of the text, through the em dash which divides Carter’s experience from that of those who wait. ‘[S]‌truck dumb with amazement’, Carter’s feeble attempt to describe the sight before him is, in the end, perfect. He witnesses ‘wonderful things’. What kind of wonder is this? And what is so wonderful about ancient things? Excavating British literary culture across the long fin de siècle to

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uncover the transformative impacts of archaeological discourse, this book unearths a prehistory and an aesthetic context for Carter’s powerful archaeological narrative. The passage above highlights several of the central qualities of archaeological experience as represented at the fin de siècle: it is both aesthetic and intellectual, both temporally and emotionally destabilising, both frightening and alluring, and transformative to the styles and media in which it is represented. Archaeological encounters are also inherently transgressive—​ violating traditional borders of space, time, culture, and personhood. In piercing a hole in the doorway Carter both ruins the doorway and also breaches the spatio-​ temporal border between his own and Tutankhamen’s world. Immediately following the passage above, Carter explains, ‘Then widening the hole a little further, so that we both could see, we inserted an electric torch.’3 Carter’s narration introduces violence to the silent, hidden spaces of the past, an electric torch suddenly replacing his reverential reflection. The suggestion of defilement in the encounter, in which Carter penetrates the space with his arm and expands it before inserting the torch, points also to the themes of imperial, technological, and sexual violation that pervade British archaeological narratives at the turn of the twentieth century. Following the famous declaration of ‘wonderful things’, Carter meditates on the ‘feeling of awe—​embarrassment almost’ that an excavator must experience in such a moment, ‘when they break into a chamber closed and sealed by pious hands so many centuries ago’.4 A sense of personal violation but also transhistorical communion diffuses his imagination: ‘The very air you breathe, unchanged throughout the centuries you share with those who laid the mummy to its rest. Time is annihilated by little intimate details such as these, and you feel an intruder.’5 Carter reflects on the intimacy of the moment, and the utter ‘annihilat[ion]’ of time between his own modern experience and the moment the ‘pious hands’ of the past entombed their king. Suddenly ‘you’ are part of this intrusion, breathing the stale air along with the archaeologist, embarrassed and also excited by the intimacy of the moment. The archaeological encounter transforms time and modern subjectivity in shocking ways that are in turn transformative to the prose style of Carter’s narrative. This book examines these various qualities of archaeological encounter as represented primarily in literature, but also in visual art. The excavation of Tutankhamen’s tomb, after all, uncovered what is perhaps one of the most widely recognised aesthetic objects of archaeological discovery—​the gilded death mask of the young pharaoh. Exploring a range of literary and visual artefacts, this book reveals how writers and artists engaged with the materials of the past as a central mode of conceptualizing modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. In the revised and expanded 1921 version of Oscar Wilde’s 1889 novella The Portrait of Mr. W.H., the unnamed narrator recalls how Shakespeare’s

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sonnets first affected him so intimately. ‘A book of sonnets’, he claims, ‘published nearly three hundred years ago, written by a dead hand and in honour of a dead youth, had suddenly explained to me the whole story of my soul’s romance.’6 This meditation glides immediately into his memory of opening an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus: ‘I remembered how once in Egypt I had been present at the opening of a frescoed coffin that had been found in one of the basalt tombs at Thebes. Inside there was the body of a young girl swathed in tight bands of linen, and with a gilt mask over the face.’ He recalls that the mummy held ‘a scroll of yellow papyrus covered with strange characters’ and wishes that he would have had the scroll read to him. ‘It might have told me something more about the soul that hid within me, and had its mysteries of passion of which I was kept in ignorance. Strange, that we knew so little about ourselves, and that our most intimate personality was concealed from us! Were we to look in tombs for our real life, and in art for the legend of our days?’7 Wilde’s passage, like those in many of the texts I examine, explores the extent to which the material artefacts and bodies of the past are capable of facilitating personal, even spiritual, revelations for present peoples; they contain the secrets of our souls that we alone cannot access. Wilde’s narrator suggests that we know very little about ourselves, and poses a provocative question about the formation, understanding, and even the discovery of his own modern subjectivity—​a question for which he finds possible solutions in the fantasy of an intimate connection between the present and the ancient past. This unnamed narrator’s desire to understand the ‘strange characters’ in an ancient text to discover his own hidden soul suggests how, for writers and artists at the fin de siècle, archaeology offered new and exciting ways of knowing. For the writers and artists in this study, archaeological encounters, reading practices, and imagery offer ways of knowing the self, the world, and time.

Other archaeologies The chapters in this book offer various archaeological epistemologies at the long fin de siècle. Thus, what follows is not a catalogue of literary references to mummies, Greek statuary, or unearthed cities like Pompeii. Rather, I trace how writers turned to the archaeological imagination to transform central discourses and debates at the turn of the twentieth century: facilitating the development of queer iconography and the recovery of silenced or neglected histories; shaping aesthetic experimentation and Decadent prose styles; inspiring artefactual forgery and transforming modern conceptions of authenticity; and helping writers and artists navigate and historicise the traumas of the First World War.

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As this list of discourses suggests, this book is not devoted to simple nostalgia. I am not as interested in writers and artists who longed to validate traditional histories or cultural hierarchies, though of course archaeological discourse was employed for those ends as well. This book is more interested in archaeology as a transgressive practice, in recognising how writers and artists unearthed the silenced, unsanctioned, and unofficial histories from beneath the dust and mud to imagine radical possibilities for their present and future. Early in the twentieth century, proponents of Futurism lashed out against nostalgia for the past and archaeology as one of its attendant disciplines. Marinetti’s 1909 ‘Manifeste du Futurisme’, the founding document of the movement, derides ‘the fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides, and antiques dealers’.8 Boccioni and his fellow Futurist painters likewise despised how Italy was viewed by other countries as ‘a land of the dead, an immense Pompeii’, proclaiming: ‘[D]‌own with mercenary restorers of antiquated incrustations! Down with archaeologists afflicted by chronic necrophilia!’9 These condemnations showcase the centrality of archaeological discourse in conceptions of modernity at the time, and highlight how fraught the discussions were. In their introductory essay to a 2004 special issue of Modernism/​modernity, entitled ‘Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity’, Jeffrey Schnapp, Michael Shanks, and Matthew Tiews address this antagonism, explaining how Futurists and advocates of the avant-​garde targeted nineteenth-​ century archaeology (both amateur, connoisseurship archaeology and the newly emerging scientific archaeology of academics) as a ‘monolithic antiquarianism whose deeper logic is declared insidious because it locates the past at the very core of a conservative, continuity-​ based vision of the future’.10 And yet, as Schnapp, Shanks, and Tiews point out, ‘the abolition of archaeology has nested within it a positive counterproposal’. They continue: ‘It stands as the precondition for an other (and even othering) archaeology loosely affiliated both with Freud’s tracking of subterranean psychic and somatic intensities, and with an ongoing modern preoccupation […] with tapping into “prehistoric” instinctualisms, violence, savagery, sacrifice, and sacrality.’ This ‘other archaeology … cherishes the duplicity of archaeological objects: their moments of decontextualization and recontextualization. In being dug out and ripped from its matrix, the old object holds the potential of producing the effect of the new, by virtue of its very remoteness and alterity, its singularity.’11 This book explores how a range of writers created these ‘other’ archaeologies through their texts. Showcasing how writers and artists revelled in ‘the duplicity of archaeological objects’, I trace how writers of various genres decontextualised and recontextualised archaeological objects and even landscapes to transform the discourses of modernity. The writers in this study seize upon the radical potentials in archaeological materials, as well as what Virginia Zimmerman

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calls the ‘powerful epistemological trope’ of archaeological excavation.12 As Schnapp, Shanks, and Tiews note, archaeological discourse continued in the twentieth century to be associated with Freud’s analogy between psychoanalysis and archaeological excavation, first introduced in his 1896 lecture ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’. Recent scholarship led by Eleanor Dobson and Gemma Banks has unearthed literary explorations of physical, temporal, and psychological depth even before the 1890s, revealing the extent to which geology, archaeology, and literature informed each other across the long fin de siècle.13 Though this book focuses on archaeological discourse as a mode for challenging tradition and reimagining silenced voices, it also fully recognises the exploitative and cruel systems through which Western archaeologists and governments excavated and seized artefacts. Each chapter shows an awareness of what Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi call archaeology’s ‘intensely colonialist legacy’, acknowledging how systems of imperialism, colonialism, and other forms of cultural and economic oppression remain deeply implicated in the archaeological project.14 In their Foreword for the Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology, Lydon and Rizvi make explicit the obvious, that ‘[archaeology’s] practitioners (both amateur and professional) have appropriated, possessed, and controlled someone else’s cultural heritage, often in the name of colonialism’.15 Similarly, in his introduction to Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique, Matthew Liebmann acknowledges archaeology’s ‘role in the historical production and deconstruction of colonialist discourses’: ‘From the earliest days of the discipline, archaeology has played a part in creating and controlling the representation of the past in colonized societies.’16 Despite, or perhaps because of, archaeology’s deep implication with systems of colonialism—​what Liebmann calls the ‘attendant colonialist, neocolonialist, and imperialist baggage’ of archaeological practice—​the discipline has only recently begun to engage honestly with postcolonial theory.17 However, these recent engagements, while working to decolonise the profession, also suggest a more ethical future for archaeological study, as well as promising new ways of re-​reading established archaeological knowledge. Lydon and Rizvi argue that archaeology’s historically crucial role in colonialism positions it as possibly vital for ‘re-​visioning the relations of production of knowledge about the past’.18 One of my key claims is that writers across the turn of the twentieth century turn to archaeology to unearth and amplify silenced voices. This claim is subject to Gayatri Spivak’s famous concern that in assigning voices to the subaltern we remain within, and likely perpetuate ‘the circuit of colonial production’.19 The writers in this book are generally not self-​proclaimed archaeologists or historians at all, and thus rarely attempt to assign voices to bygone peoples with an air of historical

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authority. Instead, they revel in the inherent subjectiveness of archaeological encounter rather than claiming any real objectivity. Some even view such self-​proclaimed empiricism as sordid. For example, in ‘The Truth of Masks’ (1891), Wilde lauds the ‘attitude of the Renaissance towards the antique world’, claiming, ‘Archaeology to them was not a mere science for the antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the new wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn.’20 Wilde appeals to the prerogative of the artist to breathe beauty into ‘old and outworn’ forms, rather than attempt to recreate them as they were. Writers in this book usually appropriate artefacts or landscapes for the sake of personal and aesthetic experimentation, and prefer their appropriations to remain imaginative rather than authoritative. However, this study acknowledges that even fictions are not excused from othering processes like Orientalism, and faces such essentialist representations head-​on. Meanwhile, I also explore how writers engage with archaeology to imagine identities that dissolve national, cultural, or temporal bounds. In my readings of the ‘other’ archaeologies here, I draw from Schnapp, Shanks, and Tiews’s description of readers and writers who ‘[cherish] the duplicity of archaeological objects’ that have been de-​and re-​contextualised, and ‘by virtue of [their] very remoteness and alterity, [their] singularity that allows for radical reconsiderations of self and other’, allow for new ongoing meaning making in the past and present.21 Additionally, this book often turns to literary representations of the museum, a space vitally linked with colonialism, nationalism, and, the practice of ‘dissociating Indigenous descendants from their heritage’.22 While according to Lydon and Rizvi, these spaces ‘have become Eurocentric regimes of memory, their fixity and permanence an antidote to modernity’s sense of instability and anxiety’, this book addresses the ways that museums also often fail to regulate the behaviours of their visitors and exhibits.23 As Ruth Hoberman and Andreas Huyssen have shown, museumgoers and exhibits often misbehave. ‘[D]‌espite the pressures of rules and decorum, despite the self-​regulation enforced by their visibility within a public space’, Hoberman claims, ‘actual [Edwardian] museumgoers experienced the museum in complex and unpredictable ways’.24 Similarly, Huyssen argues, ‘No matter how much the museum, consciously or unconsciously, produced and affirms the symbolic order, there is always a surplus of meaning that exceeds set ideological boundaries, opening spaces for reflection and counter-​hegemonic memory.’25 So, despite their apparent ‘fixity and permanence’, museum spaces and the clash of cultures and bodies within them can also create the very ‘instability and anxiety’ they seek to redress. Museum spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certainly sanctioned imperialism, national identity, and taste, but could also exacerbate anxieties about

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all three. This is demonstrated in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Burden of Nineveh’ (rev. 1870), in which the speaker observes ‘a wingèd beast from Nineveh’ being ‘hoist[ed]’ into the British Museum, and meditates on the bull god’s millennia of experience (lines 10, 9).26 In the poem’s final stanzas, Rossetti’s speaker imagines a future Australian empire transporting the great Assyrian bull from a ruined England, ‘a relic now /​Of London, not of Nineveh!’ (lines 179–​180). The speaker concludes the poem with an incisive apostrophe, ‘Oh Nineveh, was this thy God,—​/​Thine also, mighty Nineveh?’ (lines 199–​200). He suggests that in its violent imperial quest, England differed little from the primitive empire whose monuments it hauled across the globe. In its ethnocentrism and short-​sighted pursuit of power, England risked the very same future it now imposed on ancient Assyria. Thus, while recognising how archaeology helped to construct colonial discourse, this book explores how British writers and artists unsettled sanctioned histories and temporalities and experimented with archaeological discourse to reshape conversations about not only imperialism, but sexuality, aesthetics, authenticity, and historiography.

‘Whether of Thebes or Nineveh’: British archaeology at the fin de siècle In ‘The Burden of Nineveh’, Rossetti’s speaker meditates on the great Nineveh bull, exhibited a floor beneath the mummies of Egypt: Why, of those mummies in the room Above, there might indeed have come One out of Egypt to thy home, An alien. Nay were not some   Of these thine own ‘antiquity’? (lines 101–​105)

The speaker fantasises about a historically vague period in which the figures recontextualised (or newly entombed) above visited the bull monument, before he corrects himself. Recalling that some of the mummies were ancient even to the Assyrians, the speaker wonders at the vastnesss of time and the relativism of historical distance.27 He continues: And now,—​they and their gods and thou All relics here together,—​now Whose profit? whether bull or cow, Isis or Ibis, who or how,   Whether of Thebes or Nineveh? (lines 106–​110)

While lamenting the bull god’s fall from grace, as he is placed alongside strange pieces from distant times and places, this crowded space is also a

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sort of dream world outside of time. To envision the great Assyrian bull just a floor below Egyptian mummies and beside Ibis figures is exciting, provocative, and—​though only made possible by an imperial violence the poem critiques—​one of the greatest ways archaeological excavation facilitated historical and personal fantasy. To track archaeology’s role in shaping several key discourses of modernity, my study invokes a range of ancient and more temporally proximate civilisations that inspired the aesthetic and literary imagination of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century Britain. Instead of confining each chapter to the influence of particular civilisations or sites, what follows replicates the archaeological imagination as fin-​de-​siècle writers and artists more often experienced it in museum spaces and the popular press—​as an eclectic mixture of ancient and not-​so-​distant civilisations from across the globe, tethered to each other by archaeological discourse and its evocative imagery, methods, and analogic relationship with excavations of the self. The chapters in this book thus exhibit writers and artists drawing from Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and domestic archaeology, often simultaneously, or engaging more broadly with the processes of archaeological interment, excavation, and interpretation. However, to facilitate the discussions that follow, I want to provide a brief introduction to the various ancient cultures and icons that impelled renegotiations of gendered, sexual, historical, and aesthetic politics at the turn of the twentieth century, beginning with Egypt. As many scholars have demonstrated, Egyptomania suffused Europe well before Carter discovered Tutankhamen. After Napoleon’s military expedition through Egypt in 1798–​1801, Egyptian artefacts arrived in Europe in large numbers, where they were traded among collectors and also displayed in the British Museum. In 1821, the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, so named because of its Egyptian façade, featured the exhibition of a well-​ publicised archaeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni, who excavated at Abu Simbel, Giza, and Thebes.28 Egyptology offered tactile connections to a non-​ classical history and aesthetic, and shaped prominent understandings of what Westerners termed the Orient. Susanne Duesterberg positions Egyptian archaeology against classical archaeology as ‘the less familiar strangeness’, claiming that as demonstrated by the reception of Egyptian archaeology, ‘the archaeological space functioned not only as a space for (re)creating and completing identity in Victorian and Edwardian society, but also as a counter-​discourse for subverting, inverting, and (re)negotiating it’.29 In 1882, England began its unofficial occupation of Egypt, often referred to as the ‘veiled protectorate’, an arrangement which opened up Egypt as a convenient exotic travel destination. This occupation lasted until 1914—​a time span roughly corresponding to the scope of this book.30 In the same year that the occupation began, Amelia Edwards set up the Egypt Exploration

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Fund, which sponsored archaeologists like William Flinders Petrie in their excavations. The rise in travel to Egypt also spurred Egyptian-​esque archaeological romances like Haggard’s She (1887), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Marie Corelli’s Ziska (1897), and Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). Since the early 2000s, several scholars including Donald Malcolm Reid, Scott Trafton, David Gange, Roger Luckhurst, and Stephanie Moser, have produced rich readings of Egypt’s imperial, historical, religious, and aesthetic impacts on the Western world, and the West’s often disastrous impacts on Egypt.31 The rise of Ancient Egypt Reception Studies in the last decade features new perspectives on Egyptomania in art, architecture, fashion, and—​ as exemplified in work by Lynn Parramore, Maria Fleischhack, Eleanor Dobson, and Molly Youngkin, among others—​literature of various genres.32 Much scholarly attention in recent years has addressed the ways in which the ‘Egyptian Question’—​a phrase designating the complicated collection of political, financial, and ethical concerns surrounding Britain’s precarious occupation of Egypt after 1882—​and the ‘Woman Question’—​the group of topics associated with women’s shifting roles in society, including women’s suffrage and property rights—​pervaded the press at similar times, placing gender politics and international politics side by side. Recent studies by Bradley Deane, Andrew Stauffer, Nolwenn Corriou, and Kate Hebblethwaite, among others, have invited us to read the discourses of archaeology, fiction, and the New Woman through each other, focusing mainly on the romances listed just above.33 As I have argued elsewhere, ‘across a range of late-​Victorian fiction, we see writers turning to the unearthed female mummy and ancient femininity to shape the discourse of the New Woman, envisioning “new” female subjectivities as emerging not as a product of the late nineteenth century but as “old” potential buried in ancient womanhood and merely released by the social, sexual, and political conditions of modernity’. Victorian artists across multiple media turned to archaeological materials to craft an aesthetic of subversive feminine power.34 This book expands on this claim, revealing how writers across genres and modes turned to archaeological discourse to create subversive content of various kinds. Beyond Egypt, one of the most prominent locales of archaeological inspiration for British writers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Greece. The dubious acquisition and installation of the Parthenon Sculptures (or the ‘Elgin marbles’) in the British Museum in 1816, along with the discovery of ancient Troy by Heinrich Schliemann in 1865, brought Greek antiquities to the forefront of British culture and aesthetic appreciation. For nearly twenty years, scholars have established how the literature, art, and culture of ancient Greece especially facilitated writers in their explorations of same-​sex desire. While Linda Dowling’s Hellenism

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and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994) does not deal directly with archaeology, this text firmly establishes the ways in which Victorian writers found in the ancient past ample opportunity to express radical sexual possibilities in the modern world. In addition to Dowling’s work, Stefano Evangelista’s British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (2009) and ‘Greek Textual Archaeology and Erotic Epigraphy in Simeon Solomon and Michael Field’ (2013) and Iain Ross’s Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (2013) address archaeology’s influence on fin-​de-​siècle British aestheticism and queer writers like Wilde, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee [Violet Paget], and Michael Field [Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley].35 In fact, studies of nineteenth-​century Hellenism are so numerous that they have to an extent overshadowed the significant influence of the ancient world more broadly across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My study aims to address this disparity in contemporary scholarship, restoring our understanding of the archaeological imagination as involving diverse ancient and not-​so-​ancient civilisations. In addition to Greece and Egypt, British tourists also explored the Italian cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, amazed by their catastrophic destruction and subsequent preservation. The devastation of the Vesuvian cities offered material for spectacle and drama. Along with the development of vulcanology and geology in the eighteenth century, the ongoing activity of Vesuvius inspired a spate of commercial volcanic spectacles in the UK and Europe—​pyrotechnic re-​enactments of volcanic eruptions. By 1792, Nicholas Daly explains, ‘[T]‌he volcano could register in a contained and ordered form both the fires of the French Revolution and the seismic changes wrought by industrialization.’36 In the early nineteenth century, with the rise of Romanticism and increased archaeological activity in Pompeii, people grew increasingly interested in the more ancient eruption of Vesuvius, and, as Daly claims, focused attention ‘on the collision of the volcano with humanity, the moment of destruction and preservation’.37 Thus the spectacles shifted, and writers adapted the personal dramas of Pompeii for poetry and opera. Zimmerman claims that while geographically distant, ancient Pompeii seemed to Victorians culturally proximate. What the Victorians enjoyed in Pompeii was ‘an almost gleeful assumption of coevalness’; ‘The Victorians did not assume they were the same as the Pompeians; rather, they assumed the Pompeians were the same as them.’38 Pompeii was another site that offered Victorians opportunities to discuss sex more explicitly in the name of study. Contemporary anthropologist Barbara Voss explains that even the term ‘pornography (literally, whore-​ writing) was coined in 1850 by German archaeologist C.O Müller to classify a diverse set of objects and images found at Pompeii’.39 Additionally, because of the unique and unintentional nature of the presentation of

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Pompeii, the private and quotidian survived alongside, or instead of, the public and political, allowing visitors to connect on a more personal level with the imagined inhabitants of the ancient cities. Zimmerman’s work reveals that the ‘relics of domestic, quotidian life’, rather than public monuments, interested archaeologists and writers most at Pompeii, who sought to recapture the final, personal moments of the ill-​fated inhabitants.40 My final chapter argues that the sudden devastation of Pompeii and the narratives made famous by Victorian adaptations of the event were a primary site of return for artists working to mediate the violence of industrial warfare and the tragedies of its individual victims. Beside this legacy of natural violence inscribed in the archaeological record are legacies of human and imperial violence, like that of ancient Assyria. As mentioned above and displayed in Rossetti’s ‘The Burden of Nineveh’, remains in the near East revealed unsettling parallels for Victorians between the fallen empires of the past and their own. ‘Once British archeologists began hauling the strange, half-​mute remnants of these elder empires to the center of their own modern one’, claims Stauffer, ‘the melancholy comparisons began in earnest: as Assyria and Ancient Egypt are now, so shall we be’.41 Victorians encountered the ‘half-​mute remnants’ of Assyria wherever they went, from the British Museum, to the Crystal Palace (where they toured a reconstruction of ancient Nineveh), to the Royal Princess Theatre, where Charles Kean’s 1853 revival of Byron’s Sardanapalus featured stage sets, costumes, and even physical gestures based on the artefacts uncovered by archaeological celebrity Austen Henry Layard.42 Indeed, after Layard published his best-​selling work Nineveh and its Remains in 1849, British writers and artists enjoyed a ten-​year period of extreme interest in Assyria and its ruins. But these remnants disconcerted traditional Victorian taste in ways the smooth white statues of Greece did not. ‘The palpable otherness of the Assyrian monuments’, claims Stauffer, ‘is opposed to the deep continuities between the Parthenon stones and English self-​conceptions, particularly with regard to taste’. Assyrian sculptures ‘seem[ed] by contrast only primitive and idolatrous, even ugly’.43 Although by the turn of the twentieth century ancient Assyria held less sway over the British public, overshadowed perhaps by increasing excavations in Egypt, the lasting influence of the Assyrian bull icon is evident in E.M. Forster’s 1913 novel Maurice, which I address in my first chapter. In Maurice, as in many works by queer or otherwise unorthodox writers I address, being ‘primitive and idolatrous’ is a virtue for an archaeological remnant, offering in its dissident aesthetic an opportunity to question the authorised history and challenge the national narrative. While Edward Said’s foundational Orientalism (1978) has invited scholars for decades to investigate Western engagements with the East, an

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investigation which as evidenced above appears richly in studies of archaeological discourse in the nineteenth century, this impulse, according to Robert Aguirre, along with ‘[th]e relative marginality of Spanish in traditions of humanistic scholarship’ and ‘the dominance of colonial and postcolonial studies […] have combined to skew our understanding of British imperialism and obscure the importance of Britain’s engagement with Latin America, an engagement whose ideologies, images, and stereotypes shape our perceptions to this day’.44 Aguirre’s work uncovers the proliferation of images and materials from Mexico and Central America in Victorian culture from 1821 to 1898, a span which ‘witnessed an extraordinary burst of representations that occurred between the first European museum exhibit of Aztec antiquities (mounted in London) and the absorption of pre-​Columbian materials into the British novel via the work of H. Rider Haggard, G.A. Henty, and others’.45 He investigates the complicated imperial and economic dynamics that shaped Britain’s relationship with Mexico and Central America, focusing on the ‘imperial desire for objects, rather than territory’. He uncovers how Mexican and Central American artefacts (and people) were often deployed in ‘imperial science’ to uphold racist hierarchies, noting the British Museum’s maintenance of a clear ideology: ‘the inferiority of Mesoamerican antiquities to classical ones’.46 Exploring European scholarly, political, and travel engagements with these regions as ‘the cultural work of informal imperialism’, Aguirre expands our understanding of the cultures and artefacts involved in the British archaeological imagination.47 He concludes his book, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (2005) with a reading of Haggard’s Montezuma’s Daughter (1894), enriching literary studies of Haggard which have more often focused on his engagement with the material cultures of Egypt and South Africa. But ugly, unfamiliar, and supposedly ‘inferior’ artefacts from across the globe were not the only discoveries complicating the historical record. British writers and artists had at their disposal increasing information about the history beneath their own feet. In 1882—​the same year in which England began its unofficial occupation of Egypt, and Amelia Edwards started the Egypt Exploration Fund—​ the Ancient Monuments Act, or the Ancient Monuments Protection Act, passed in Parliament. Between 1882 and 1931 in Britain—​the precise span of time with which this study is interested—​ around 3000 ancient monuments came under protection by law, enabling the government to work with private landowners to secure the archaeological monuments on their property.48 Such local preservation movements correspond to an inter-​war neo-​Romanticism in which we can situate figures discussed in my fourth chapter, Mary Butts and Paul Nash. While Assyria seemed a ‘dark mirror of England at a time when the nation took up its

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imperial project in earnest’, excavations across Great Britain reminded Victorians that it too was once an imperial outpost.49 Even within the city of London, as Zimmerman has explained, urban improvement projects continually yielded remnants of the ancient past, Londinium always lurking below, and often protruding into the surface of, the modern city.50 Domestic archaeology plays the largest role in my second and fourth chapters, which trace archaeology through interrelated destabilising moments—​the rise of British modernism and the crisis of the Great War—​suggesting that aesthetic and political turmoil demanded a re-​reading and refashioning of local landscapes and national identities. Identity in the modernist years following the Great War would be re-​ informed by Carter, holding his lit candle through a small breach in the tomb’s door. The year 1922 was also a crucial year for modernism according to both the modernists themselves and contemporary scholars.51 In this year, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, and the Later Poems of Yeats were all published, as well as the first issues of The Criterion, a British literary magazine which in its first year alone published works by Luigi Pirandello, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, E.M. Forster, and W.B. Yeats. This book will show that these seemingly disparate events—​the publication of major modernist works, and the twentieth century’s most famous archaeological excavation—​are by no means unrelated. The rise of literary and cultural modernism and the monumental and well-​publicised excavation of Tutankhamen’s tomb emerge together from cultural, aesthetic, and geo-​political events of the late nineteenth century: the occupation of Egypt in 1882 and the subsequent increase in archaeological tourism, the proliferation of archaeological romances by writers like Haggard and Corelli, the renewed obsession with Eastern and near-​Eastern art of aesthetes and decadents, and the historical and aesthetic crises prompted by modern industrial warfare. In Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (2015), Vincent Sherry claims that despite their connection: It is essential nonetheless to maintain the difference between ‘modern’ (or ‘modernization’) and ‘modernism’ which, in turn, refer to the chronological location of the twentieth century (with its accelerating dynamic of change) and a special, ramifying self-​consciousness about living in this particular moment in time, that is, of living in this brink-​instant of the ultra-​Present and working within the apprehension of this charged condition of constant change.52

My own understanding of ‘modern’ as indicating a self-​conscious relationality between now and then, along with Sherry’s emphasis on modernism as a ‘special, ramifying self-​consciousness about living in this particular moment in time’, shapes one of the larger underlying claims of this project—​that the archaeological encounter is essentially a modern experience, one that even

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impels modernist literary and aesthetic expression. The encounter with the artefact or body from the past necessarily reminds the encounterer of her position in the present, and, as my chapters will exhibit, often demands that the formal or aesthetic qualities of the representation of that encounter represent the sensibility of ‘living in this brink-​instant of the ultra-​Present’.

Chapter summaries At the fin de siècle, authors like Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, and E.M. Forster navigate the tension between fascination with the past and the desire for queer futures by manipulating temporality through archaeological encounters. Like archaeologists of the imagination, these figures uncover and reconstitute artefacts, structures, and images from the past that hold what Elizabeth Freeman calls the ‘undetonated energy’ necessary for creating radical possibilities for the present and the future. By exposing audiences to non-​normative experiences of temporality, these artists craft visions of what queer theorists identify as ‘queer temporalities’. In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010), for example, Freeman addresses oppositional desires experienced by queer subjects navigating temporality. For them, ‘Pure nostalgia for another revolutionary moment … will not do. But nor will its opposite, a purely futural orientation that depends on forgetting the past.’ Instead, queerness may consist ‘in mining the present for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions’.53 Examining Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ (1887) and ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ (1896), Wilde’s The Sphinx (1894) and The Portrait of Mr. W.H. (1889, rev. 1921), and Forster’s Maurice (1971) and Pharos and Pharillon (1923), along with designs for The Sphinx by Charles Ricketts, Chapter 1 reveals writers and artists reaching beyond Hellenism, seeing the ancient past more broadly as a rich repository of materials for constructing and expressing queer identity. This study follows closely with the queering of the discipline of archaeology that shifts the field’s focus onto hitherto neglected or misrepresented histories. Rejecting the imposition of normative conceptions of gender, sex, and family on the archaeological record, queer archaeology encourages more expansive interpretations of past peoples. Reaching back to the archaeological encounters that drive works by Lee, Wilde, Ricketts, and Forster, this chapter explores how these artists queered archaeology long before either term had come into wide use or stable definition, creating not just unthought-​of pasts, but unimagined futures. Additionally, Chapter 1 expands an approach to Victorian reclamations of the past which has often been too narrowly confined to Hellenic movements. For example, I contextualise these aesthetic efforts beside the discovery of, and subsequent

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craze for, dozens of mummy portraits uncovered in the 1880s by William Flinders Petrie in the Fayum, a district in northwest Egypt. Created during the Roman period of Egypt, the portraits are classical in appearance but were affixed to corpses in the traditional Egyptian wrappings. The portraits, which were displayed in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1888 and widely publicised, fuelled what Dominic Montserrat calls a ‘biographising’ trend at the fin de siècle—​a desire to ‘biographis[e]‌the ancient body’, to understand and even fictionalise the personal experiences, and secret lives, of ancient individuals.54 Reading the works by Lee, Wilde, Ricketts, and Forster in this context, I demonstrate how the fragmentary, suggestive, and often sensual materials of archaeological discovery directly inspired explorations of sexual possibility. To begin, I turn to Vernon Lee, whose fictional and non-​fictional experiments with historiography and fictional portraits lead readers through both archives and abandoned ruins, uncovering secret and dissonant sexual desires in the undetonated materials of the past. From Lee, I move on to Oscar Wilde, whose appropriations of the ancient and Elizabethan past in The Sphinx and The Portrait of Mr. W.H., undertaken with the designer and illustrator Charles Ricketts, recover the potential energy in material culture to exhibit queer desire and posit a transhistorical queer community. Finally, this chapter concludes with a discussion of E.M. Forster’s Maurice and Pharos and Pharillon, demonstrating how Forster turned to the historical relationships between modern men and ancient artefacts and landscapes to depict non-​normative sexual experience. In presenting alternative ways of knowing and interacting with the past through material remains and queer reading practices, these writers lead their readers through a queer archaeological excavation of the long turn of the century. In this process of excavating and reconstituting the past to generate non-​ normative possibility, these artists necessitate a secondary excavation—​ that done by their audience. To unearth what is encoded in the layers of a text or image—​a queerness that, like archaeological material, is always simultaneously hidden and discoverable in its hiding places—​readers and viewers must adopt unique digging practices. Thus queerness, in the works addressed in Chapter 1, operates as an epistemological frame of mind into which these artists lead their audience through what we might call a queer archaeological epistemology. My second chapter takes up the innovative ways of reading and knowing the past introduced in Chapter 1, and shows that aesthetic innovators at the fin de siècle found archaeology-​inspired ways of reading portraits, creating portraits out of prose, and crafting a Decadent prose style shaped by the sensual experience of archaeological discovery. Thus, this chapter takes the earlier focus on queer reading practices and non-​normative temporalities

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and shows how such archaeologically inspired materials transfigure the forms of Decadent texts. As Alex Murray and Jason David Hall note in their introduction to Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle (2013), ‘Since 2000, the historicised and politicised readings of decadence [prominent in the 1990s] have been reunited with attention to literary form.’55 However, most recent studies of Decadent form are focused on poetry, rather than prose. Walter Pater, however, in his 1889 essay ‘Style’, the first entry in Appreciations, discusses the artistic possibilities of prose. In fact, Pater declares that prose is ‘the special art of the modern world’.56 Thus, while Murray and Hall have like many critics identified the role of Romantic poets (including Keats and Blake) in Decadence, and that of seventeenth-​century poets (such as Marlowe) in twentieth-​century modernism, this chapter unearths another line of inheritance by their side and with an even greater span—​a Decadent prose genealogy inspired by ancient imagery and a key seventeenth-​century archaeological text that reaches forward to Virginia Woolf, where form continues to envision a gendered and temporal alterity inspired by the past. Drawing from the earlier analysis of Wilde and Lee, I examine Walter Pater’s collection Imaginary Portraits (1885–​1887) alongside Lee’s ‘Oke of Okehurst’ (1890) and Louis Norbert (1914), as well as Lee’s essay ‘Faustus and Helena’ (1880, 1881) and some of her travel writing (e.g., Genius Loci, 1899). I argue that Pater and Lee create an archaeological epistemology of portraiture—​a way of composing and looking at portraits—​that is both inspired by archaeological excavation and also embedded in their prose styles. Additionally, my readings of Lee show how she draws from Decadent aesthetics in her transhistorical tales of ghosts and archival mysteries to craft an experimental Decadent prose which also gestures to the iconoclasm and severed perspectives of modernism. Chapter 2 also explores additional works by Pater, including Appreciations (1889), and concludes with a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and several essays. Pater’s admiration for the work of eighteenth-​ century German antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann is well known. However, Pater was also deeply inspired by the prose of seventeenth-​century English polymath Sir Thomas Browne, particularly Browne’s 1658 archaeological tract, Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial—​a meditation on a collection of burial urns discovered in Norfolk—​an obsession he shared with many late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century stylists including Woolf. In Urn Burial’s particularly tactile, sensuous archaeological reflections, late-​ Victorian and twentieth-​ century writers found an evocative frame for meditations on the paradox of beautiful morbidity, as well as a stylistic and formal model for innovating experimental prose. In The Renaissance, Pater envisions Winckelmann’s encounters with unearthed artefacts in Dresden revealing the ‘unexpressed

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pulsation[s]‌’ previously hidden in the words of Greek poetry.57 Similarly, in his essay ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, Pater claims, ‘The desire to “record these risen ashes and not to let them be buried twice among us,” had set free, in his manner of conceiving things, something not wholly analysable, something that may be properly called genius, which shapes his use of common words to stronger and deeper senses, in a way unusual in prose writing.’58 The archaeological discovery resuscitates these aesthetic critics; and Browne in turn breathes life into disparate elements, transforming ‘common words’ into quite uncommon prose. I suggest that Pater and Woolf draw from these archaeological meditations in their own prose experiments and conceptions of new literary genres. In its examination of the formal styles of prose portraits and archaeological meditations, this chapter teases out the archaeological methods and encounters woven into the fabric of experimental Decadent prose at the fin de siècle. While public institutions and individual connoisseurs embraced and collected new archaeological finds such as mummy portraits, Greek sculptures, and ancient burial urns, the market for such objects clearly engendered a trade in fakes and a burgeoning anxiety over the authenticity of objects in circulation. In Fake: The Art of Deception (1990), Mark Jones claims that in the nineteenth century, the mania for collecting ‘created a paradise for dishonest dealers’, and that fakes ‘are, before all else, a response to demand, an ever changing portrait of human desires’.59 While numerous scholars have traced the issues of authenticity, forgery, and imitation in the nineteenth century, most have studied literary and artistic forgery.60 Clearly, however, archaeological debates at the fin de siècle shaped literary and aesthetic discussions about legitimacy, value, and authenticity as well, contributing specific issues, anxieties, and concerns about the ancient past to the discussion. My third chapter then tracks a more powerful and pervasive connection between archaeology, desire, and wider discourses of authenticity at the fin de siècle. While familiar narratives of disciplinarity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries trace the increasing specialisation of the disciplines and institutionalisation of knowledge, another narrative alongside these traces a simultaneous democratisation of knowledge, in part through the public museum enterprise. Archaeological discourse played a role in both movements. While traditionalists often turned to archaeological materials to reify national, aesthetic, and cultural hierarchies, plenty of writers turned to archaeology to upend sanctioned versions of history. Whereas Chapter 1 shows how queer writers embraced the fragmentary and suggestive nature of archaeological materials to unearth silenced histories and represent non-​normative desire, Chapter 3 examines how figures both within and far outside academic and museum institutions, and

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those associated with radical politics and anarchism, turned for similar reasons to archaeology and archaeological forgery. Familiar forgeries in nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century literary culture (several of which are addressed elsewhere in this book) include the fictional forged portrait of boy actor Willie Hughes, from Oscar Wilde’s Mr. W.H.; the real portrait of the fictional Willie Hughes that Wilde commissioned Charles Ricketts to create; the ancient pot sherd of Amenartas, commissioned by H. Rider Haggard to accompany his 1887 novel She; the crystal skulls, and the Piltdown man. But in Chapter 3, I also consider the Tiara of Saitaphernes, the Neolithic implements of Flint Jack, the medieval ecclesiastical ornaments of Louis Marcy, the very Victorian ancient Greek Tanagra figurines, the dubious Neolithic discoveries at Dumbuck, Scotland, and the ‘wonderful things’ possibly pedalled by Howard Carter before he hit the jackpot at Tut’s tomb. Considering such spurious objects and the stories that circulated around them, Chapter 3 examines archaeological handbooks and articles in the popular press by a range of archaeologists, anthropologists, art collectors, and critics (such as Scottish archaeologist Robert Munro, English archaeologist John Evans, and fantasy writer Andrew Lang), and delves into discussions of archaeological forgeries such as the famous Greek Tanagra figurines. This chapter ultimately reveals how the fragmentariness of the material record and the subjective experience of archaeological encounter helped rewrite conceptions of intellectual hierarchy, legitimacy, the sanctioned historical narrative, and who gets to write the stories of the past. Chapter 3 concludes with a discussion of contemporary artist Damien Hirst’s controversial exhibit and documentary film, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (2017), offering a new way to read this provocative project through the lens of the Victorian archaeological imagination and the fin-​de-​siècle discourses of authenticity that it shaped. The documentary tracks a team of archaeologists funded by an eccentric artist—​Hirst—​as they uncover a trove of gorgeous archaeological finds in an underwater excavation. The cast pieces together the story of Amotan, an ancient collector, whose barge sunk with collection and was lost until its dramatic discovery. The film crafts a lush archaeological fantasy that concludes with shots of the exhibit at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. The entire project is fake, forged. And yet, it is a beautiful story featuring stunning pieces of anachronistic ancient-​ inspired art. Taking a cue from a cast member in the film, who claims that the discovery on the ocean floor is like a ‘strange Victorian grotto of the underworld’, I suggest that Hirst is remaking and revelling in the fin-​de-​siècle archaeological imagination, forging a new story from fragments, and asking us to challenge our understandings of historical and aesthetic legitimacy.

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Several of the debates about archaeological authenticity I discuss in Chapter 3 were driven in part by a growing desire to reconcile the crises of modernity and industrial war with human beings’ deeply ancient, or ‘primitive’ beginnings. The First World War’s utter devastation and violence necessarily fuelled this desire, and in Chapter 4 I reveal how archaeological narratives and imagery helped writers and artists craft unofficial and dissonant historiographies of the war. Both transforming and producing archaeological landscapes and narratives, the Great War forced a generation to rethink its so-​called civilisation. As archaeologist Nicholas Saunders claims, ‘Archaeology and war have an enduring and ambiguous relationship—​both create in the very act of destroying.’ Though every major conflict leaves its impact in the archaeological record, ‘it is the material and psychological immensity of industrialised conflict which embodies the extremes of our behaviours—​from a nation’s production and mobilisation of material force, to an individual’s struggle with injury, loss, and despair’.61 Drawing from recent scholarship by archaeologists like Saunders, and Gabriel Moshenska, Chapter 4 examines how the encounter with war produces an experience similar in many ways to the archaeological encounter—​effecting a destabilised sense of time, the world, and the self. Ultimately, this final chapter explores how figures including the war artist Paul Nash and modernist writer Mary Butts, along with several others, turn to prehistoric landscapes in and beyond Great Britain to represent the shock of their modern moment and to historicise the unprecedented catastrophe of industrial warfare. The first section of Chapter 4 examines visual art and life writing by Nash. I propose that Nash was interested in what contemporary archaeologists call ‘ideational landscapes’—​landscapes that are imaginative (i.e., a mental image) and emotional (‘cultivating or eliciting some spiritual value or ideal’), and ‘may provide moral messages, recount mythic histories, and record genealogies’.62 I demonstrate how Nash transplants forms of familiar ideational landscapes like Wittenham Clumps (Berkshire, UK) and pyramid shapes onto unfamiliar and frightening landscapes of war, registering both devastation and transformation and highlighting the ironies and uncanniness of war experience. Nash’s stunning descriptions and images of war-​torn landscapes invert the fantasy of bodies uncovered from the dirt, eerily gesturing through their absence to the live men concealed beneath the surface. Additionally, Nash’s prose and images during wartime conjure scenes of uncanny archaeological ruin reminiscent of images of Pompeii—​an association which is corroborated by other first-​hand witnesses of No Man’s Land, and which I take up in the second section of Chapter 4. Demonstrating how writers including Louise Mack (an Australian journalist), H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Marcel Proust, and various soldiers reshape Victorian narratives of the volcanic

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destruction and archaeological discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum (by writers like Edward Bulwer-Lytton) to historicise the war’s destruction, we uncover how such adaptations shape our own historiographies of Pompeii, of Victorian archaeological tourism, and of the Great War itself. In the third section of Chapter 4, I turn to Mary Butts’s Ashe of Rings (1925). This novel—​which Butts labels in a retrospective 1933 Afterword ‘a War-​fairy-​tale’—​stages a battle of good and evil over the ground of a prehistoric Dorset earthwork. Personifying the war in the novel’s villainess, Butts transfigures the fin-​de-​siècle femmes fatales of late-​Victorian romance writers like Haggard and Corelli to evil ends, and offers in opposition another feminine type inspired by British mythic priestesses, characterised by her connection to the ancient landscape. In flight from the horrors of modernity, Butts’s novel reconstitutes the war rhetoric of sacrifice, proposing a new modernity in greater harmony with the mythic past. The chapter concludes with a look at contemporary excavations of First World War battlefields in France, revealing how contemporary writers and archaeologists are borrowing these same tropes as we uncover the First World warscape. In addressing figures like Nash, Butts, H.D., and soldier-​writers, and focusing on their prose, life ​writing, and visual art, this chapter supplements a large body of scholarship of Great War literature which focuses on a small contingent of canonical, mostly male British writers, and which especially focuses on poetry. Additionally, in positioning a canonical visual artist with battlefield experience beside a neglected female writer who never saw the front, this study further challenges the canon, demonstrating how artists across genres and a range of experience carried deeply historical landscapes and forms into the war, deploying and converting these forms to register dramatic personal, topographical, and geo-​political change. In examining the different ways these artists adapt archaeological experience to navigate the war’s catastrophic procedures and effects, we see how the fin-​de-​siècle archaeological fantasy is reshaped in the twentieth century to produce experimental aesthetic modes and new ways of understanding the self, the earth, and time in a world suddenly and violently transformed. In turning to archaeological discourse to transform the way people think about, write about, and thus understand, themselves and their modernity, the works examined in each chapter thus offer a unique kind of archaeological knowledge. Recent works by landscape archaeologists and classicists like David Harvey, Michael Shanks, and Mark Edmonds advocate for, in Harvey’s words, ‘a more dynamic and open-​ended engagement with the landscape’, and aim towards ‘making space for other voices within the context of archaeological practice’.63 Harvey explains that such work ‘has

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also sought to break up the clean lines of some past endeavours, bringing an imaginative and reflexive frame of mind to problematise easy finalities with a wilful hesitancy and sense of disruption […] In making space for some “other stories”, however, we should allow the space for other story-​tellers: for non-​academic voices, for travelling objects, the ephemeral, non-​durable and prosaic.’64 Might these ‘other story-​tellers’ include figures like Oscar Wilde, Mary Butts, or Flint Jack? Might the ‘travelling objects’ include Ricketts’s lost portrait of Willie Hughes, or even a forged Tanagra figurine? This book unearths a variety of ‘other story-​tellers’ from the literary archive of the turn of the twentieth century. I suggest that what follows in each chapter is a sort of archaeological epistemology—​an example of writers and artists engaging with dynamic and ever-​changing landscapes, bodies, and artefacts in ways that continue to remake their meaning. Focusing on oral histories from inhabitants of historical (but still lived-​in) landscapes, Harvey claims that such accounts ‘call for us to excavate the normative written record of scientific discovery and heritage management in order to find further voices that can add to the contribution of historical geographers and archaeologists to unveil the embodied and fluid understandings of historic features’.65 Harvey’s call for ‘further voices’ is echoed in a recent collection, entitled Writing Remains: New Intersections of Archaeology, Literature and Science (2021) edited by Josie Gill, Catriona McKenzie, and Emma Lightfoot, which positions archaeologists and literary scholars side by side and in dialogue. The volume tackles key questions that emerge when we honestly consider the ‘tensions between the disciplines’ and the interactions between archaeology and narrative, such as ‘who can, and with what authority, write stories and create narratives about the past.’66 In the volume’s seventh chapter, Robert Witcher and Daniël van Helden propose a closer relationship between archaeology and fiction, suggesting this engagement ‘might stimulate a more empathetic view of the past and provoke insights and questions that might not otherwise have been raised’.67 In what follows, I do not suggest that archaeologists should consult poems by Wilde or fiction by Butts to date the artefacts in an Egyptian tomb or reconstruct the lives of Bronze age Britons. However, when we explore the various textual and visual artefacts in this book, attuning ourselves to the ways in which writers and artists create their modernity through archaeological discourse, we encounter new ways to ‘unveil the embodied and fluid understandings’ of the materials of the past. The writers and artists examined in this book were full of wonder about beautiful things and buried stories, and testified to the dynamic and ongoing meaning-​making of archaeological artefacts, bodies, and landscapes. They sought their real lives in tombs, and transformed the

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discourses of modern experience. To propel us into this cultural history of wonder, we begin, appropriately, in Egypt.

Notes 1 Howard Carter and Arthur Mace, The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), p. 95. 2 Ibid., pp. 95–​96. 3 Ibid., pp. 96. 4 Ibid., pp. 97. 5 Ibid. 6 Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H. (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921), p. 118. 7 Ibid. 8 F.T. Marinetti, ‘Manifeste du futurisme’, Le Figaro, 20 February 1909, trans. Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Qtd. in Schnapp, Shanks, and Tiews, ‘Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity’, Modernism/​modernity, 11.1 (2004), 3. 9 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrá, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Painters,’ in Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 63. 10 Schnapp, Shanks, and Tiews, ‘Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity’, p. 4. 11 Ibid. 12 Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), p. 8. 13 See Eleanor Dobson and Gemma Banks (eds), Victoriographies special issue, ‘Strata: Geology, Psychology, and Archaeology in Victorian and Edwardian Literature’, 7:3 (2016); Dobson and Banks (eds), Excavating Modernity: Physical, Temporal and Psychological Strata in Literature, 1900–​ 1930 (New York: Routledge, 2018), which ‘scrutinizes physical, temporal and psychological strata across early twentieth-​century literature, focusing on geological and archaeological tropes and conceptions of the stratified psyche’ (abstract). 14 Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi (eds), ‘Introduction: Postcolonialism and Archaeology’, in Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 13. 15 Ibid. 16 Matthew Liebmann, introduction in Liebmann and Rizvi (eds), Archaeology and the Postcolonial Critique (New York: Altamira Press, 2008), p. 6. 17 Ibid., p. 2. 18 Lydon and Rizvi, Introduction, p. 13. 19 Gayatri Spivak, ‘from A Critique of Postcolonial Reason’ in Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd edn (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010), p. 2118.

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20 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Truth of Masks’, in Intentions (Leipzig: Heinemann and Balestier, 1891), p. 191. 21 Schnapp, Shanks, and Tiews, ‘Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity’, p. 4. 22 Lydon and Rizvi, Introduction, p. 23. 23 Ibid., p. 26. 24 Ruth Hoberman, Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 3. 25 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 15. 26 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The Burden of Nineveh’, in Poems (London: Ellis & White, 1881), p. 170. 27 Rossetti struggled in revisions of these lines, working to maintain both an accurate chronology and the wonder of the hypothetical question. See Andrew Stauffer’s ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Burdens of Nineveh’, in Victorian Literature and Culture 33 (2005), pp. 369–​394, 383–​384. 28 Sophie Thomas, ‘Displaying Egypt: Archaeology, Spectacle, and the Museum in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Literature and Science 5:1 (2012), p. 10. 29 Susanne Duesterberg, Popular Receptions of Archaeology: Fictional and Factual Texts in 19th and Early 20th Century Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 331. Duesterberg’s italics. 30 In 1914, when the Ottoman Empire joined the Axis Powers in the First World War, Britain declared an official protectorate over Egypt. When Egypt declared its independence on 28 February 1922, the formal protectorate ended. But Britain continued to occupy the country in some capacity until 1956. 31 Consider Donald Malcolm Reid’s Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (2002); Scott Trafton’s Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-​Century American Egyptomania (2004); David Gange’s Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822–​1922 (2013); and works by Stephanie Moser, including Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (2006) and Designing Antiquity: Owen Jones, Ancient Egypt and the Crystal Palace (2012). Century 32 See Parramore’s Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-​ Literary Culture (2008); Fleischhack’s Narrating Ancient Egypt: The Representation of Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-​Century and Early Twentieth-​ Century Fantastic Fiction (2015); and Youngkin’s British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–​1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (2016); Dobson’s ‘Cross-​Dressing Scholars and Mummies in Drag: Egyptology and Queer Identity’, Aegyptiaca. Journal of the History of Reception of Ancient Egypt 4 (2019), 33–​54. 33 See Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–​1914 (2014); Stauffer’s Introduction and selection of appendices for his edition of Haggard’s She (2006); Nolwenn Corriou, ‘ “A woman is a woman if she had been dead five thousand centuries!”: Mummy Fiction, Imperialism, and the Politics of Gender’, Miranda 11 (2015): miranda.

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revues.org/​6899; Hebblethwaite, Introduction to The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker (New York: Penguin Books, 2008). 34 Blumberg, ‘Victorian Literature and Archaeology: Contemporary Excavations’, Literature Compass 15:4 (2018), 5. 35 For discussions of gender and ancient Rome, see Laura Eastlake, Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 36 Nicholas Daly, ‘The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage’, Victorian Studies 53:2 (2011), 260. 37 Ibid., p. 263. 38 Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, p. 112. 39 Barbara Voss, ‘Sexuality Studies in Archaeology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 37 (2008), 318. 40 Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, p. 120. 41 Stauffer, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Burdens of Nineveh’, p. 370. 42 See Shawn Malley, From Archaeology to Spectacle in Victorian Britain: The Case of Assyria, 1845–​1854 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), Chapter 3. 43 Stauffer, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Burdens of Nineveh’, p. 387. 44 Robert D. Aguirre, Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xv. 45 Ibid., pp. xiv–​xv. 46 Ibid., p. 91. 47 Margarita Díaz-​Andreu also utilises the term in Part II—​‘The Archaeology of Informal Imperialism’—​of A World History of Nineteenth-​Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Díaz-​Andreu considers a wide range of regions in this section, including Ottoman territories, Greece, Russia, China, Japan, and Latin America. 48 Sam Smiles, ‘Ancient Country: Nash and Prehistory’, in Jemima Montagu (ed.), Paul Nash: Modern Artist, Ancient Landscape (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), p. 34. 49 Stauffer, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Burdens of Nineveh’, p. 370. 50 Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, pp. 126–​138. 51 Ezra Pound claimed the Christian era ended when Joyce penned the final words of Ulysses on 30 October 1921, and suggested a new calendar, beginning in 1922 with year one. See Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), particularly pp. 3–​4 for Pound’s new calendar. For additional contemporary criticism with focused attention on 1922, see Kevin Jackson’s Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One (2012). Admittedly, several others of the modernists themselves identified other key years as pivotal. ‘[I]‌n or about December 1910’, for Virginia Woolf, was when ‘human character changed’ (‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, Collected Essays I (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), p. 320. 52 Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 32. 53 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. xvi.

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54 Dominic Montserrat, ‘Unidentified Human Remains: Mummies and Erotics of Biography’, in Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 182. 55 Jason David Hall and Alex Murray (eds), Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 16–​17. 56 Walter Pater, ‘Style’, in Appreciations, With an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan and Company, 1911), p. 11. 57 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 89. 58 Walter Pater, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, in Appreciations, With an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan and Company, 1911), p. 154. 59 Mark Jones, Paul Craddock, and Nicolas Barker (eds). Fake?: The Art of Deception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 13. 60 See: Aviva Briefel’s The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (2006); a 2019 issue of Victorian Network dedicated to Forgery and Century Imitation, edited by Briefel; Sara Malton’s Forgery in Nineteenth-​ Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde (2009); Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery (2015), edited by Joseph Bristow and Rebecca Mitchell; Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-​ Raphaelites to the First World War (2017); and Gregory Mackie’s Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife (2019). 61 Nicholas Saunders, ‘Excavating Memories: Archaeology and the Great War, 1914–​2001’, Antiquity 76 (2002), p. 101. 62 Bernard A. Knapp and Wendy Ashmore, ‘Archaeological Landscapes: Constructed, Conceptualized, Ideational’, in Wendy Ashmore and Bernard A. Knapp (eds), Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-​Blackwell, 1999), p. 12. 63 David Harvey, ‘Broad Down, Devon: Archaeological and Other Stories’, Journal of Material Culture 15:3 (2010), 345, 349. 64 Ibid., p. 348. 65 Ibid., p. 361. 66 Josie Gill, Catriona McKenzie, and Emma Lightfoot (eds), Introduction in Writing Remains: New Intersections of Archaeology, Literature and Science (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 1. 67 Ibid., p. 15.

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1 Queer archaeologies

In Oscar Wilde’s 1894 poem The Sphinx, the speaker implores a sphinx figure in his room to excavate and reassemble the disparate pieces of her lover Ammon: ‘Go, seek his fragments on the moor and wash them in the evening dew, /​And from their pieces make anew thy mutilated paramour!’ (lines 124, 121–​122).1 Urging the sphinx to uncover the broken pieces of ‘the great rose-​marble monolith’ ‘scattered here and there’—​his ‘giant granite hand’ and ‘Titan thews’—​the speaker tells the sphinx to ‘make /​Thy bruised bedfellow! and wake mad passions in the senseless stone!’ (lines 110, 116, 120, 123–​124). With their insistent urging and exclamatory punctuation, these lines suggest breathless excitement and sexual anticipation. The speaker seems to live vicariously through the sensual fantasy he envisions for the sphinx, continuing: Charm his dull ear with Syrian hymns! He loved your body! Oh, be kind, Pour spikenard on his hair, and wind soft rolls of linen round his limbs! Wind round his head the figured coins! Stain with red fruits those pallid  lips! Weave purple for his shrunken hips! and purple for his barren loins! (lines 125–​128)

This sensual description, which focuses on the androgynous qualities of Ammon’s hair, limbs, lips, hips, and loins, suggests a queer sexual fantasy through archaeological excavation and reconstruction. Additionally, calling upon the sphinx to re-​enact the ancient Egyptian myth in which Isis rebuilds the fragmented remains of Osiris, the speaker invokes a process of archaeological excavation and reconstruction that the poem itself enacts throughout. Imagining the sphinx leading him through millennia of time, layers of dust and Nilotic mud, and the countless lovers buried therein, the speaker of The Sphinx opens up a stratigraphic, material, and psychic space for sexual transgression.2 Wilde’s poem recalls a somewhat more familiar exploration of the analogic relationship between psychic and stratigraphic depths at the turn of the

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twentieth century, that posited by Sigmund Freud. His image of the psyche as an archaeological landscape equates the buried remains of material culture with secret or repressed psychological events. Additionally, the hypothetical explorer of Freud’s lecture ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896) is ‘arouse[d]‌’ by expanses of psychological ruins, suggesting an underlying eroticism common to both psychoanalytic and archaeological discovery.3 Freud, whose work emerged from the archaeology-​infused late nineteenth-​century context explored in this book, and who eagerly read Heinrich Schliemann’s publications of his famed discovery of Troy in 1865, was not the first to see the potential for discovering hidden sexual desires in archaeological material. Archaeology has had what Barbara Voss calls a ‘long entanglement with sexuality studies’, an entanglement which several writers and artists seized upon to explore not only secret, but dissonant sexualities at the turn of the twentieth century.4 As I have argued elsewhere, archaeological explorations undertaken by Wilde and Vernon Lee in their writing can be read as anticipating a shift in the discipline of archaeology in the 1980s impelled by feminist theory and queer theory more broadly. ‘Queer archaeology’ encourages a focus on neglected or silenced histories, and resists imposing normative conceptions of gender, sex, and family on the archaeological record, producing more expansive and inclusive interpretations of past peoples.5 ‘Queering archaeology’, writes Thomas A. Dowson, ‘empowers us to think what is often the unthinkable to produce unthought-​of pasts’.6 This chapter shows that Wilde and Lee, as well as E.M. Forster and Charles Ricketts undertake an ‘other’ archaeology in their writings across the turn of the century—​one which taps into deeply buried instinct and unearths radical new potentials for queer identity and expression. In the works of these figures, we find a sustained exploration of the intimate relationship between archaeological discourse and buried or secret stories. Creatively appropriating the sensual and often erotic undertones of archaeological adventure, they thus anticipate in their works major events in modern archaeology and queer theory, including the methodology of queer archaeology, theories of queer temporality, and queer epistemology more broadly. Reaching back to the archaeological encounters that drive works by Lee, Wilde, Ricketts, and Forster, this chapter will explore how these artists queered archaeology long before either term had come into wide use or stable definition, creating not just unthought-​of pasts, but unimagined futures. These writers and artists do as the speaker of The Sphinx compels: unearthing neglected remains, tearing them from their contexts of burial and silence, reimagining the meanings of those artefacts and bodies, wrapping them in beautiful new words and images, ‘wash[ing] them in the evening dew’. And in doing so they recontextualise these remains in ­modernity—​‘mak[ing] anew thy mutilated paramour’.

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Scholars including Richard Dellamora, Linda Dowling, Iain Ross, and Stefano Evangelista have established how the poetry, language, and art—​ particularly of ancient Greece—​provided a conceptual and aesthetic staging ground for queer writers and artists in the late nineteenth century, including Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Michael Field [Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper], and Oscar Wilde. In Studies of the Greek Poets (1873), Symonds ponders the vast expanse of time separating modernity from ancient Greece and asks, ‘How can we then bridge over the gulf which separates us from the Greeks? How shall we, whose souls are aged and wrinkled with the long years of humanity, shake hands across the centuries with those young-​eyed, young-​limbed children?’7 Evangelista claims that this fantasy is distinctly homoerotic, the young and old hands gesturing to the ancient Greek practice of pederasty.8 For Symonds, as well as other figures across the long fin de siècle, archaeological discovery offered a way to bridge the gap, to recover silenced voices from the past, and to critique and reshape the present. Evangelista claims: ‘The victory over time of the material remains of ancient Greece serves to prove that aesthetic universals are permanent through history, while social, political, and moral codes are historically contingent and unstable.’9 The fragmentary nature of archaeological evidence inspired explorations of hidden lives, and ‘the aesthetic writer’ at the turn of the century, asserts Evangelista, ‘works through completion and substitution, looking through history for the missing stories and unheard melodies, the evocative power of unrecorded voices, and the repressed discourses of human passion and invention’.10 This fantasy of recovering unheard and secret stories, though, is not limited to the materials of Greece alone. Barbara Voss adds that while the eighteenth-​century scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s ancient art studies and John Addington Symonds’s A Problem in Greek Ethics (1901) ‘were instrumental points of reference for sexologists who formulated current medico-​psychological theories of sexual orientation … Other nineteenth-​century Europeans turned to Egyptology for counter-​cultural models of sexual potency, bisexuality, gender ambiguity, and homoeroticism.’11 For example, Eleanor Dobson has examined fin-​de-​siècle ‘works that involve modern Europeans who seek knowledge of or a relationship with ancient Egyptian characters, often mummies’ to reveal how Egyptology provided opportunities for exploring ‘the fluidity of gender identity’, tracing the emergence of cross-​dressing as a trope in literary culture shaped by archaeological discoveries.12 Thus, this chapter locates the more familiar late nineteenth-​century appropriation of the Hellenic past within a much broader cultural movement in which the fragmentary, suggestive, and often sensual materials of archaeological discovery thus directly inspired late-​Victorian explorations of sexual possibility. One particularly rich example of this phenomenon is the discovery of, and subsequent craze for, a cache of artefacts that are aesthetic and

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historical hybrids. Throughout the 1880s, German and English archaeologists uncovered over a hundred ancient portraits in a north-​west district of Egypt called the Fayum. Dating to the Roman period of Egypt (first to third centuries CE), these images are classical in appearance, but are painted on linen or wood panels and affixed to mummies—​earning them the popular title ‘mummy portraits.’ The portraits were exhibited and widely publicised in Egypt, Berlin, Paris, and in London at the Egyptian Hall in 1888. This exhibit only briefly preceded the discovery of a large collection of papyrus letters found in the same region in the 1890s. Though not directly related to the portraits, these documents provided additional personal details to help fictionalise the lives of the people in the portraits. Examining first-​person responses to the portraits and the ancient letters, Dominic Montserrat claims that these artefacts ‘can aid the modern reader to be an historical scopophile, to read hidden secrets’.13 He addresses German Egyptologist Georg Ebers’s full-​length study of a collection of mummy portraits, which was translated into English in 1893. Ebers ultimately determines that the subjects of the portraits are mostly Hellenic Greeks, along with some of the ‘higher rank of Semitic families.’14 Ebers employs often racist physiognomic readings of the portraits, even while he gleefully envisions the lives of the sitters. Perhaps the most interesting passages in Ebers’s study are his imaginative speculations on the lives of many of the subjects depicted. He describes in detail the images of several young men, often attractive and bare-​shouldered. Reading a portrait of a man ‘not much past the bloom of youth’, Ebers longingly contemplates his hair, which ‘falls in natural and perhaps not unintentional disorder over his brow’, ‘his not unpleasing but impulsive face’, ‘the bold, alert eyes and the sensuous mustachioed lips’, and concludes that he was perhaps ‘a headstrong man who nevertheless was ready enough to yield when necessary for the gratification of unbridled desires’. Another description of a boy reads, ‘Defiance and sensuality accentuate his full lips, self-​ reliance sparkles in his large dark eyes, and though his portrait has been much damaged it still enables us to look into the soul of a youth untroubled by any thought of death, who enjoyed all the pleasures of his age and was already satiated with some.’15 Addressing similar descriptions of portraits of two other young men, Montserrat explains: ‘Ebers’ physiognomic and racial preconceptions turn the adolescent boys of the portraits into either dissipated, hot-​blooded sensualists (Orientals) or romantic, languid flowers who embrace death (Greeks). These are both standard figures in the language of fin-​de-​siècle decadence, particularly for encrypting “deviant” sexual desire.’16 In Ebers’s eroticised descriptions of the young men, and his romanticised discussion of their probable early deaths, Montserrat sees the mummy portraits as related to the obsession in the 1890s with Antinous, the lover of the emperor Hadrian, who drowned in the Nile and subsequently became in the late nineteenth century a ‘paradigm of doomed male

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Figure 1.1  Panel Portrait of a Man—​from the Fayum in Egypt, late first century CE. (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.)

beauty, and also as a way of encoding male homosexual desire’. These late-​ Victorian excavations of Antinous are a part of the ongoing, dynamic story of Hadrian’s lover and a transhistorical queer community.17 This is just one example of the many ways in which fin-​de-​siècle literary and aesthetic

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engagements with archaeology have transformed archaeological memory itself. In fact, Montserrat compellingly proposes that Wilde either visited or read about the exhibition of the Fayum portraits at the Egyptian Hall in 1888 while working on The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Portrait of Mr. W.H. and that his familiarity with these portraits likely influenced these portrait-​centred texts.18 By exposing audiences to non-​normative experiences of temporality, the artists in this chapter craft visions of what contemporary queer theorists like Carolyn Dinshaw and Elizabeth Freeman have identified as queer temporalities. In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010), Freeman addresses oppositional desires experienced by queer subjects navigating temporality. Building on Freeman’s claim (regarding the figures in her own study) that ‘the queerness of these artists consists in mining the present for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions’, I argue that Lee, Wilde, Ricketts, and Forster navigate the tension between fascination with the past and the desire for new futures by manipulating temporality through archaeological encounters.19 Like archaeologists of the imagination, these figures mine the present, uncovering and reconstituting artefacts, structures, and images from the past that hold the ‘undetonated energy’ necessary for creating radical possibilities for the present and the future. In this process of excavating and reconstituting the past to generate non-​ normative possibility, these artists necessitate a secondary excavation—​ that done by their audience. To unearth what is encoded in the layers of a text or image—​a queerness that, like archaeological material, is always simultaneously hidden and discoverable in its hiding places—​readers and viewers must adopt unique digging practices. Thus queerness, in the works addressed here, operates as an epistemological frame of mind into which these artists lead their audience through what we might call a queer archaeological epistemology. I turn first to Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ and ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ and several essays in which Lee’s experiments with historiography lead readers through both archives and abandoned ruins, unearthing secret and dissonant desires from the undetonated materials of the past. This chapter then addresses Wilde, whose engagement with the ancient and Elizabethan past in The Sphinx and The Portrait of Mr. W.H., undertaken with the designer and illustrator Charles Ricketts, recover potential energy embedded in the past to explore queer desire and posit a transhistorical queer community. Finally, this chapter concludes with a discussion of E.M. Forster’s Maurice and Pharos and Pharillon, demonstrating how Forster turns to stratified landscapes and coded artefacts, and the secret relationships they reveal to special readers. In presenting alternative ways of knowing and interacting with the past through material remains and queer reading practices, these writers lead

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their readers through a queer archaeological excavation of the long turn of the century.

Vernon Lee’s rubbish heaps and queer materiality For Vernon Lee (the still-​standard pseudonym for Violet Paget), archaeology’s value for historiography and aesthetic theory was problematic, and her attitude towards the developing field remains somewhat difficult to read. Lee occasionally mocked earlier cultures for a superficial appropriation of archaeology. For example, in Euphorion (1884), her study of medieval and Renaissance art, she refers to the ‘mere archæological finery’ of the ‘pseudo antique obscenities’ of the Renaissance.20 Nevertheless, such dismissals demonstrate Lee’s awareness of and interest in the archaeological excavations of her own historical moment. Lee wrote prolifically from the 1880s into the 1930s on aesthetics, art history, music, and travel, and also produced fiction. Through her extensive travels and studies of art history, Lee would have been immersed in the correlative discourse of archaeology. Additionally, she was personally involved with archaeologists at the fin de siècle. In the 1880s and 1890s, Lee’s social set included several archaeologists and classicists. At a dinner party in July 1886, Lee met Eugénie Sellers, the first woman admitted to the British School at Athens who, in 1891, translated Karl Schuchardt’s work Schliemann’s Excavations of Troy. Sellers was a friend and pupil of the famed Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, whose 1885 publication Introductory Studies in Greek Art Lee was eager to criticise. While documentation of Lee’s exact complaints is unavailable, she seems primarily to have found fault in Harrison’s overreliance on Plato and the concept of Ideality as a model for all art.21 By developing a relationship with Sellers, Lee found another opportunity to critique Harrison’s work, but also a more intimate attraction, and the pair began an ongoing correspondence, even living together briefly in London in 1893. ‘Their friendship’, writes Evangelista, ‘which was built on intellectual exchange and interspersed with elements of romantic investment, became instrumental in keeping alive Lee’s interest in the ancient world through the late 1880s and early 1890s’.22 She gave Sellers credit for inspiring her own interest in antiquity, and in her preface to Renaissance Fancies and Studies, thanks Sellers (along with Bernhard Berenson and Mary Logan) for providing ‘a little of that archaeological and critical knowledge which is now-​a-​days quite unattainable save by highly trained specialists’.23 These biographical details suggest that in the late 1880s and 1890s, Lee’s appropriations of archaeological

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discourse in her stories were deliberate, and perhaps influenced by an erotic attachment. As her multifaceted interest in antiquity and aesthetics would suggest, Lee’s approach to archaeological remains is bound up in her attitude towards empiricism and historicism. Although many of her contemporaries, including those involved in the Society for Psychical Research (SPR, founded at Cambridge in 1882) worked to meld spiritualism and empiricism in their investigations of psychic phenomena, Lee denigrates the overvaluation of empiricism. Lee mocks the so-​called ‘genuine ghost’ of the SPR, studied by ‘ghost-​experts’ and supported by evidence, and implies such a ghost is considered genuine by virtue of its ‘being, generally speaking, flat, stale, and unprofitable’. Her superior spectres are things of the imagination, born there, bred there, sprung from the strange confused heaps, half-​rubbish, half-​treasure, which lie in our fancy, heaps of half-​ faded recollections, of fragmentary vivid impressions, litter of multi-​ coloured tatters, and faded herbs and flowers […]24

Anticipating Freud’s depiction of psychoanalysis as tomb raid, Lee presents the revenants of her short fiction as birthed from the rubbish-​heaps of the imagination, vaguely remembered artefacts extracted from the material piles of mental refuge. These heaps in the consciousness produce a strange yet pleasurable ‘odour’, a ‘musty and damp, but penetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady’ effluvium of the buried parts of ourselves which, Lee maintains, ‘we all know’.25 Lee’s insistence on the psychic, personal, and aesthetic significance of ‘confused heaps’ and ‘rubbish’ also anticipates modern archaeology’s reconsideration of garbage as a culturally-​valuable archive of material history. In ‘The Perfume of Garbage: Modernity and the Archaeological’, Michael Shanks, David Platt, and William Rathje define ‘the archaeological’ as a critical term capable of encompassing: ruin and responses to it, to the mundane and quotidian articulated with grand historical scenarios, to materializations of the experience of history, material aura, senses of place and history, choices of what to keep and what to let go (remember/​forget) … the intimate connection between all this and a utopian frame of mind (archaeology is not just about the past, but about desired futures too). And the stuff of it all is garbage.26

While these authors explain that archaeologists did not begin to recognise the relationship between archaeology and garbage until the 1970s, Lee’s appropriation of detritus as material culture at the fin de siècle seems perfectly described by this contemporary definition. In not only her short stories but in her non-​fiction works, including Genius Loci (1899), Euphorion, and

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The Spirit of Rome (1906), Lee returns continually to the animating image of the rubbish-​heap. For example, in The Spirit of Rome, Lee disparages the ‘squalor’ of Rome: If Rome undoubtedly gives the soul peace by its assurance that the present is as nothing in the centuries, it also depresses one, in other moods, with the feeling that all history is but a vast rubbish-​heap and sink; that nothing matters, nothing comes out of all the ages save rags and brutishness.27

Despite this rather morose contention about what ‘comes out’ of history (written in 1902), she continues, ‘There is a great value for our souls in any place which tells us, by however slight indications, of a past of self-​respect, activity, and beauty.’28 In the stories considered below, Lee rescues the ‘slight indications’ of narratives from the material culture of history, excavating remnants of the past and reconstructing them into something other than brutishness—​an unsanctioned record of ‘self-​respect, activity, and beauty’. Lee’s works thus engage particularly with the sifting and selection of past materials—​‘what to keep and what to let go’. Shanks, Platt, and Rathje claim that ‘the primary archaeological project’, since the late nineteenth century, has been ‘less the interpretation of the past (that can wait), and more a project to ensure that the remains of the past will endure, in themselves or as some kind of formal and sanctioned record’.29 Lee’s emphasis on the pleasurably strange ‘odour’ of mental refuse (interestingly anticipating the ‘Perfume of Garbage’), suggests that the process of uncovering neglected pieces of the historical record produces a pleasurable un-​sanctioned narrative, subverting official and normative records of history and conceptions of cultural value. Lee’s short stories brim with strange and neglected objects, demonstrating what Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham describe as Lee’s consciousness ‘of the hidden accretions or layers of history that have built up around a particular locale’.30 While many of her more popular contemporaries, like H. Rider Haggard and Bram Stoker, appropriated archaeology in literal ways in their romances, Lee’s short stories take a subtler approach, sifting through the weight of historical material, wading through its ‘hidden accretions or layers’ in order to challenge conventional narratives of history, gender, and desire. Reconsidering and reshaping archaeological fragments, Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ and ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ foreground queer narratives and identities rescued from the rubbish heaps of history. Both ‘Amour Dure’ and ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ present ostensibly heterosexual attachments which contemporary scholars have read as actually queer. In ‘Amour Dure’, first published in Murray’s Magazine in 1887, a young Polish scholar travels to the Italian village of Urbania intending to write a work of scholarly history. Bitterly dissatisfied with German

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scholarship, Spiridion Trepka longs for deeper communion with the past, and soon finds what he is looking for in his archival studies of the sixteenth-​ century femme fatale, Medea da Carpi. Published nine years after ‘Amour Dure’, ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ features a young prince obsessed with a half-​snake woman on a tapestry in his childhood bedroom. When exiled to the ruined Castle of Sparkling Waters, Prince Alberic befriends a garden snake and an old woman, both of which turn out to be the cursed snake lady of the tapestry, with whom he falls in love. In ‘Amour Dure’, what at first glance promises to unfold as a heterosexual romance narrative, Lee embeds tropes of forbidden desire, framing the queerness of Trepka’s erotic attachment in terms of temporal and perhaps necrophilic impossibility: ‘Those pedants say that the dead are dead, the past is past’, Trepka writes. ‘For them, yes; but why for me?—​why for a man who loves, who is consumed with the love of a woman?—​a woman who, indeed—​yes, let me finish the sentence.’31 The rest of the sentence might be, ‘a woman who, indeed, is dead’. But rather than finish this sentence, Trepka immediately asks another question: ‘Why should there not be ghosts to such as can see them?’ Here, Lee suggests that those who perceive history differently from others can interact with that history in unique ways. For example, Trepka’s transhistorical love for Medea is positioned against a stifling heteronormativity. As Trepka’s obsession with Medea grows, he complains about the ‘degeneracy’ of modern Italian women, suggesting Lee’s efforts to reflect the language of degeneracy—​often used to denigrate queer desire—​back onto a heteronormative community that appears in this story as tawdry and superficial. Additionally, a dandyish friend of Trepka’s ‘thinks [him] very odd’ for having no entertaining stories of romantic engagements.32 Ardel Haefele-​Thomas notes that in her Gothic tales, Lee repeatedly uses the words ‘odd’ and ‘strange’ as codes for ‘queer’, observing that several of Lee’s stories can be read as ‘an argument in defence of queer identity and a queer community in the face of late Victorian British legal, journalistic and public onslaught’.33 Haefele-​Thomas also suggests that in another of her stories (‘The Image’), Lee creatively mocks the presumed non-​existence of female same-​sex love.34 In ‘Amour Dure’, the temporal impossibility of Trepka’s love seems to stand in for other non-​normative desires similarly dismissed as unreal. Likewise, Lee’s ‘Prince Alberic’ resounds with queer encounters and suggestions. The story appeared in the July 1896 volume of The Yellow Book—​the first to be released after Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment. Indeed, Margaret Stetz reads ‘Prince Alberic’ as a defence of Wilde: ‘The fate of Alberic, the art-​worshipping dreamer who is persecuted and imprisoned for refusing to renounce an outlaw love in favour of a socially approved one, is as much a political allegory as a fairy tale.’35 The story opens with a

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pragmatic description of the dissolution of the Duchy of Luna, then shifts tonally: ‘Under this dry historical fact lies hidden the strange story of Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady.’36 ‘Prince Alberic’ thus begins with the inviting suggestion that beneath layers of historical fact, ‘strange’ stories lurk which give greater meaning to familiar narratives.37 Pairing ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ with Lee’s earlier story ‘Amour Dure’, this chapter adds a material dimension to queer readings of the texts. In what follows, I argue that Trepka’s and Alberic’s transgressive desires are primarily expressed through encounters with archaeological remnants. Lee depicts archaeology as an alternative mode of knowing alternative or counter-​cultural histories. In ‘Amour Dure’, Lee constructs a narrative in which a scholar’s apprehension and reconstruction of neglected material artefacts transforms the refuse of the material past into tangible manifestations of his own buried, taboo desires. Similarly, presenting a loving non-​normative romance in ‘Prince Alberic’ through beautiful and neglected ruins, Lee again suggests that historical and personal truths are best sought in the most undemonstrative of material remains. While Lee presents the dissonant sexual desires of both ‘Amour Dure’ and ‘Prince Alberic’ through evocative encounters with the material culture of the past, she frames the stories in such a way that her readers are invited to encounter the text like Trepka and Alberic approach the artefacts in their respective narratives—​facilitating our own ability to unearth queer histories from heaps of material. Early in ‘Amour Dure’, Trepka notes in his diary his ‘vain belief that some day these scraps will help … to bring to my mind, in that hateful Babylon of Berlin, these happy Italian days’.38 The ‘scraps’ of diary out of which the entirety of the story is composed exemplify the ‘strange confused heaps’ in Lee’s preface to Hauntings. Prior to his journey, Trepka explains, he was ‘attracted by the strange figure of a woman, which appeared from out of the dry pages’ of historical texts.39 This archival fantasy is the beginning of a story committed to the romantic possibilities hidden in historical texts and materials. Lee relies on the image of a heap from which buried secrets are uncovered when Trepka discovers in the archives ‘a heap of letters’ written by Medea herself, and bearing ‘a scent as of a woman’s hair’—​a sensual private discovery which he hides from the archival Director.40 ‘Prince Alberic’ likewise is framed around a central artefactual encounter—​Alberic’s obsession with the snake lady tapestry in his childhood bedroom—​as well as significant encounters with material remains both at the Red Palace and the Castle of Sparkling Waters, all of which facilitate Alberic’s developing self-​awareness and sexuality. The archaeological fantasy of ‘Amour Dure’ invokes the classical enchantress Medea who married and was abandoned by Jason, and subsequently enacted her violent revenge on him, Lee’s Medea similarly claimed a string

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of historical lovers, many of whom die either directly or indirectly because of her. In an effort to ‘reconstruct the beauty of this terrible being’, Trepka discovers a miniature portrait of Medea in the archives, a marble bust in a lumber-​room, and a large portrait in which Medea models Cleopatra kneeling at the feet of Augustus. In one scene, Trepka wanders through ‘irregular-​shaped closets’ of the chateau in which he resides (which is also the home of an antiquities dealer). He catches sight of himself in a mirror, and, startled, sees behind him another portrait of Medea—​‘the real Medea, a thousand times more real, individual, and powerful than in the other ­portraits’.41 Trepka’s encounter in the closet with his own image and that of Medea suggests that his investigation of the historical woman leads him to unexplored depths within himself. Combining what he has learned from each of these fragments, Trepka imagines the appearance of the mysterious woman.42 Describing Medea’s face (which he has gleaned mostly from the miniature), Lee opposes the words ‘conventional’ and ‘strange’. The image of Medea appears ‘at first rather conventional’, but is also a strange kind of beauty: ‘Tight eyelids and tight lips gave a strange refinement, and, at the same time, an air of mystery, a somewhat sinister seductiveness … voluptuous yet cold, which, the more it is contemplated, the more it troubles and haunts the mind.’43 Closely resembling the femmes fatales of Swinburne’s poetry, the portrait also resembles Pater’s meditation on the Mona Lisa (‘la Gioconda’), whose beauty ‘is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions’.44 Christa Zorn reads the story’s portrait as its own ‘subtext’—​‘an animated version of Pater’s portrayal of ‘la Gioconda’—​and sees Lee’s use of the portrait as both imitative and subversive of Pater’s style. She argues, ‘By sexualizing her narrator’s perspective, [Lee] shows the limitations of the “modern” mind whose time-​transcending consciousness simply reproduces cultural relationships between subject and object, past and present, male and female.’45 While Trepka’s description of Medea’s portrait may be read as exposing the misogyny behind aesthetic criticism, the relationship between Trepka and his historical woman is not entirely bound by heteronormative structures. Indeed, one might productively read this portrait as invoking a different ‘subtext’—​a queer literary portrait tradition at the fin de siècle. In addition to, and perhaps not merely coincidental with, the aforementioned Fayum mummy portrait phenomenon in the late 1880s, Yvonne Ivory has demonstrated that several late nineteenth-​century writers turned to the Renaissance ‘as a potential site of exploration for the newly-​classified homosexual, a place where his new “identity” could be tried on, thought through, assessed, and even practiced’.46 Ivory focuses on the portrait itself ‘as plot device, as literary genre, as aesthetic object, and as material object’. Addressing

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recent scholarship tracing the relationship between portraiture and sexuality in the late nineteenth century, Ivory examines a group of queer authors who ‘created literary portraits of Renaissance individualists whose personalities … encompassed great sexual complexity’.47 Key authors she takes up include Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and Vita Sackville-​ West, as well as Lee herself, though she does not address ‘Amour Dure’. However, Ivory maintains that ‘Lee’s erotic attachment to members of her own sex … finds an expression in the discussion of Renaissance art.’48 In my reading, Trepka excavates the ‘strange’ image of a beloved historical woman involved in serial seductions and criminality, and sees eroticism in her portrait; in doing so, Trepka seems to act out the queer literary portrait tradition of the fin de siècle. Recovering from a heap of mouldering archival refuse an intimate physical and emotional connection to a woman from the past, Trepka engages in a queer archaeological process that offers a tangible validation of his personal desire that extends outwards, creating a portrait that expands the boundaries of desire for all viewers. Through such tandem movements of visual and individual apprehension, Lee sets up tableaux that repeat throughout each story, in which the protagonists come to self-​awareness through engagement with material remains. Perhaps the richest example of such apprehension appears in ‘Prince Alberic’, in which the young prince’s engagement with the tapestry in his bedroom exposes and shapes his unconventional desires. Describing the tapestry, the narrator begins at the border and continues inward, explaining that Alberic grew familiar with the tapestry in the same direction. The boy learns about the natural world from outer spaces on the tapestry, turning to the middle, which ‘was the most worn and discoloured’, only as he matures.49 Alberic’s investigation of the tapestry traces his development into young adulthood and initial sexual awareness, suggesting that its textual weave mirrors his own layers of complex thought and emotional depth. Describing the process through which Alberic becomes familiar with the tapestry, the narrator of ‘Prince Alberic’ performs a sort of ekphrastic reading. The narrator conveys Alberic’s visual experience using childlike hyperbole and the rhythm of lists to depict the images Alberic admires in his infancy, then employs more analytical language to describe what he sees as a child, and finally turns to language that indicates Alberic’s own developing aesthetic sensibility when he matures. To the very young prince, the tapestry ‘was quite full of things, and they were all delightful’, including ‘curious live creatures of some sort—​various birds, big and little, butterflies on the lilies, snails, squirrels, mice, and rabbits, and even a hare, with such pointed ears’.50 As Alberic grows, and his attention moves inward on the tapestry, the narrator presents his more thoughtful investigation of the tapestry’s roads, rivers, and paths, which were ‘rather confused’, ‘but Alberic, in the course

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of time, contrived to make them all out, and knew exactly whence the river came which turned the big mill-​wheel, and how many bends it made before coming to the fishing nets’. And finally, Alberic comes to admire the lady in the centre, ‘although she was so very pale and faded, and almost the colour of the moonbeams through the palace windows in summer’.51 Alberic admires the lady because of what he perceives as her difference. Her dress is beautiful because it is ‘unlike those of the ladies who got out of the coaches’, and when Alberic finally sees the woman’s lower half and learns that ‘instead of a skirt, she ended off in a big snake’s tail’ he responds with ‘violent ­excitement’.52 The narrator claims he ‘loved the beautiful lady … only the more because she ended off in the long twisting body of a snake’.53 As Alberic’s attention moves from the more vivid imagery on the outer edges of the tapestry to the artefact’s obscure and faded centre, he simultaneously apprehends and joyfully encounters his own queer desire. Repeating this narrative phenomenon, in which Alberic’s visual and material encounters with art or archaeological objects are rendered through language, the narrative invites the reader herself to perform ekphrastic readings of the text. In itself, ekphrasis is a type of formalism, but one that Brian Glavey points out is relational, ‘a way of attaching to objects rather than a testament to their autonomy’. Glavey asserts, ‘From this relational perspective, form offers a way to talk about the patterns that provide the stuff and structure of sexuality.’54 This contemporary theoretical approach to ekphrasis corresponds with Alberic’s encounters with his beloved tapestry, a relationship which both reveals and shapes Alberic’s sexual and aesthetic desires. Glavey notes, ‘[N]‌egative and affirmative conceptions of form are both subject to the imputation that caring about art, that believing that either literature or our critique of it might have any sort of power, can itself seem from certain angles potentially embarrassing.’ Indeed, a devotedness to formal details, Glavey claims, can be in itself queer: ‘Whether obtuse or otiose, old-​fashioned or utopian, modes of thought tied up with an attention to form are queer in the sense that they care about things too much or in all the wrong ways.’55 Alberic in particular seems to care about, and to read, art objects ‘in all the wrong ways’. His unconventional way of reading aesthetic objects, particularly those at the Red Palace, sets him apart from others and drives the plot and emotional force of the story. Though ‘[t]he whole world, indeed, were agreed that … the Red Palace of Luna was the most magnificent and delectable of residences’, Alberic ‘had always abominated the brilliant tomato-​coloured plaster’ that everyone else adores, and finds the busts of the Twelve Caesars ‘uncanny’.56 The grotto of the Court of Honour he looks upon ‘in abhorrence’, and the ‘oyster-​shell satyrs on the roof frightened him into fits’.57 Alberic’s careful reading of the tapestry’s many elements differs drastically from his grandfather’s and nurse’s

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simplistic moral readings. His grandfather dislikes the tapestry because ‘he reproved the folly of feeding the thoughts of youth on improbable events; besides, he disliked snakes and was afraid of the devil’, while the nurse exclaims upon seeing the snake lady’s bottom half, ‘Holy Virgin … why, she’s a serpent!’ and calls Alberic a ‘ninny’.58 In fact, Alberic is exiled to the Castle of Sparkling Waters as punishment for destroying a newer tapestry with which his grandfather replaces the snake lady. The Duke selects in its stead a tapestry featuring Susanna and the Elders, which Alberic cuts into strips.59 This act conveys Alberic’s disgust for the patriarchal voyeurism embodied in the Susanna story, and implies a critique of heteronormative structures more generally. The act of destroying an artefact depicting misogynistic desire foreshadows Alberic’s eventual refusal of his grandfather’s sexual tutelage when he returns years later to the Red Palace, and also foreshadows the story’s tragic conclusion. In emphasising Alberic’s (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Trepka’s) unconventional ways of reading aesthetic objects, Lee sets up a methodology which contemporary critics are able to apply back onto the stories themselves, recognising them as queer romances. A second material encounter in ‘Prince Alberic’, which produces some of the story’s most pivotal revelations, occurs at a ruined well and trough on the castle grounds. Gazing into the ‘very, very deep’ well, Alberic sees what may be a reflection of the sky, but also looks ‘like some subterranean country’. He sees ‘a face filling up part of that shining circle’, and becomes ‘ashamed’ at not initially recognising it as his own reflection.60 The well reveals Alberic to himself. In his estrangement from his own image, and the confusion between the sky’s reflection and the ‘subterranean country’, Lee suggests that Alberic encounters subterranean parts of his consciousness. Giving utterance to his own name at the image, Alberic seeks affirmation, but the well transforms his voice: ‘[I]‌nstead of his own boyish voice he was answered by wonderful tones, high and deep alternately, running through the notes of long, long cadence.’61 The description here, which Maxwell and Pulham note ‘resembles that of a castrato singer who would have been employed to sing in the Ducal Chapel at Luna’, emphasises Alberic’s androgynous qualities.62 Returning Alberic’s ‘boyish voice’ with a range of tonal qualities, the well reveals to Alberic his more-​than merely ‘boyish’ potential. Beside the well rests ‘a long narrow trough of marble’ of the type that Alberic knows ‘people had used as coffins in pagan times’. The trough is beautifully decorated, with ‘garlands carved upon it, and people with twisted snakes about them’.63 Just after drinking from the well, Alberic hears a noise, and sees ‘a long, green, glittering thing’.64 The magical land of the tapestry comes to life, and Alberic meets the snake responsible for his family’s legacy and his own future. Martha Vicinus calls the moment at which Alberic kisses the snake (breaking the curse and falling unconscious) a ‘traumatizing … moment of

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self-​recognition’.65 In this fairy tale, Vicinus continues, ‘Lee brings together every explanatory model for the boy’s passion: he is fetishistically attached to the tapestry and its narrative; he is a direct descendant in blood and resemblance to the previous two Alberics; he owes all he knows to his beloved godmother. Nature, nurture, and maternal care have all conspired to commit Alberic to an unnatural love.’66 To ‘nature, nurture, and maternal care’ I would add ‘material culture’ as one of the forces that both reveal and shape Alberic’s non-​normative destiny. The tapestry, well, and trough are not merely records of his ancestral past, but objects through which Alberic realises who he is and who—​or how—​he loves. In her characters’ encounters with archaeological objects and ruined landscapes in both ‘Amour Dure’ and ‘Prince Alberic’, Lee represents the realisation of a type of impossible fantasy imagined and dismissed earlier in Euphorion: ‘Out of the Renaissance, out of the Middle Ages, we must never hope to evoke any spectres which can talk with us and we with them.’67 While ‘we can touch’ the remnants of the past, and ‘can see, or think we see, most plainly the streets and paths, the faces and movements of that Renaissance world’, Lee writes, ‘when we try to penetrate into it, we shall find that there is but a slip of solid ground beneath us’, which turns out always to be mere paint or stucco.68 In this image, the ‘slip of solid ground’ represents time as layers of sediment that prohibit our real intimacy with the past. Simultaneously, this ‘slip of solid ground’ serves as a limit—​of imagination, of temporal unity, and of appropriate personal experience—​which to cross is to transgress. In ‘A Preface to Transgression’ (1963), Michel Foucault theorises transgression in reference to the limit, ‘that narrow zone of a line where [transgression] displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses’.69 Using stratigraphic language, Foucault imagines lines as spaces across and in which norms are violated. In both ‘Amour Dure’ and ‘Prince Alberic’, Lee’s characters transgress the border between past and present, and in these moments, Lee manipulates temporality in ways that signal queer experience. In the final scenes of ‘Amour Dure’, past and present are melded together as Trepka witnesses (or, at least claims to have witnessed) Medea in p ­ erson. He touches objects associated with Medea’s life and converses with the ghosts of Medea’s lovers. Trepka experiences a near-​merger between the present and the sixteenth century (as well as the classical past of the Medea figure), where that ‘slip of solid ground’ dissolves, and the delimiting line of temporal and personal normativity it represents is transgressed. The temporal space of transgression in the final episodes of ‘Amour Dure’ might also be understood as a present hybridised with the past, Trepka’s experience representing a queer historiographical methodology as explored by Freeman. Designating a queer historical method she terms ‘erotohistoriography’,

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which is ‘distinct from the desire for a fully present past, a restoration of bygone times’, Freeman maintains: Erotohistoriography does not write the lost object into the present so much as encounter it already in the present, by treating the present itself as hybrid. And it uses the body as a tool to effect, figure, or perform that encounter. Erotohistoriography admits that contact with historical materials can be precipitated by particular bodily dispositions, and that these connections may elicit bodily responses, even pleasurable ones, that are themselves a form of understanding.70

Lee’s Trepka, who visits Italy to produce a scholarly work using traditional historiographical practice, produces instead a hybrid work of erotohistoriography, arriving at historical understanding through bodily experience of the past in a hybridised present. One of the tangible connections between Trepka and Medea is a mysterious letter Trepka finds on his desk and addressed to him in ‘a curious handwriting which seemed strangely familiar’.71 The letter directs him to a meeting at the Church of San Giovanni Decollato (i.e., Church of St. John the Baptist, or literally, St. John the Beheaded). Given the possibility the text allows for reading Trepka as insane, Trepka’s narration depicts a present shared by supposedly long-​gone people and objects. He ventures as directed to the church. Though evidently empty and locked, Trepka hears a chant within, and enters. Inside he finds lit tapers and people dressed ‘in an extraordinary fashion’, apparently the garb of centuries past. He sees near the altar a woman holding a rose and ‘displaying a dress of deep red, with gleams of silver and gold embroideries’, and states with conviction that she is Medea da Carpi.72 Rushing across the church to meet her, ‘pushing people roughly aside, or rather … passing through impalpable bodies’, Trepka sees her face clearly, before she disappears into the night.73 Arguing with himself about the actuality of these events the following day, Trepka remembers vividly the altar in the church, on which rests a picture of ‘the daughter of Herodias dancing’—​an image which emphasises the mouldering building as a location of illicit desire, and which positions Medea as a queer stand-​in, associated with Salome and the art of Gustave Moreau.74 For validation of his memory, Trepka defers to bodily experience, and connects his recent past with his current sensations: ‘I saw her, as I see this paper that I write upon … I heard the rustle of her skirts, I smelt the scent of her hair, I raised the curtain which was shaking from her touch.’75 Trepka turns to his body as ‘a tool to effect, figure, or perform’ his encounter, to exhibit and validate its reality and the historical knowledge it reveals. Similarly, during his exile at the Castle of Sparkling Waters, Alberic develops a ‘growing sense that he was in the tapestry, but that the tapestry

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had become the whole world’.76 The world of the tapestry materialises around him, producing the utopic reality imagined through his reading, and also mirroring the temporal and physical slippage between past and present depicted in ‘Amour Dure’. Staring out of the windows of a marble house at the castle, Alberic seems to slip out of time. The narrator asks, ‘How long did Alberic stand at that window?’, after which Alberic senses steps near him, ‘a rustle of silk’, and ‘some one in a very low voice call his name’.77 The text suggests that Alberic occupies a sort of temporal borderland that he inhabits with beings he cannot see. Similar to Trepka’s erotohistoriographical encounters with Medea, Alberic experiences a sort of queer time, particularly what Carolyn Dinshaw describes as asynchrony, ‘different time frames or temporal systems colliding in a single moment of now’, revealing ‘a queer temporal condition that opens up other worlds of desire’.78 Alberic seems to summon this collision of temporalities when he announces upon entering his home in exile: ‘I am now in the castle which was built by my ancestor and namesake, the Marquis Alberic the Blond.’79 Exiled from the trumpery of his grandfather’s court, Alberic enters a queer space/​time that both reveals and further cultivates his own unconventional desires. In the story’s tragic conclusion, the Duke’s advisors break into his chamber and kill the small snake he keeps as a pet, slicing her with their blades. A ‘strange rumour’ circulates later claiming when people returned to dispose of the snake, they found ‘the body of a woman, naked, and miserably disfigured with blows and sabre cuts’. The Snake Lady’s death parallels and serves as violent retribution for Alberic’s destruction of the tapestry of Susanna and the Elders years before. Alberic dies, labelled ‘insane’, and is buried in an unmarked grave, becoming himself a neglected testament to a queer history.80 Repeating the story’s motif of torn tapestries and torn bodies, the story’s final words address what remains of the snake lady tapestry. The narrator suggestively concludes, ‘[C]‌ertain chairs and curtains in the porter’s lodge of the now long-​deserted Red Palace are made of the various pieces of an extremely damaged arras, having represented the story of Alberic the Blond and the Snake Lady.’81 Lee leaves the reader with the hint of a possible future in which neglected artefacts continue to have meaning; still fragmented, the artefact requires another reader to complete the archaeological process. Like the end of ‘Amour Dure’, in which Trepka’s collection of letters promises to reveal his own queer trans-​ temporal romance to future archival investigators, the repurposed tapestry in the lowly porter’s lodge sits prepared for subsequent encounters, ready to reveal its queer histories and inspire queer futures. In her own repurposing of archaeological refuse, Lee infuses her stories with material remains, artefacts which, in various ways, signify the deeper, transgressive desires of the self who encounters them.

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This disturbing final image of the beautiful woman torn and disfigured brings us back to The Sphinx’s ‘mutilated paramour’. In Lee’s short stories, not only dismembered bodies, but also dismissed artefacts and neglected fragments of history appear to readers as opportunities for exploring and imagining alternative histories. Whether ‘Prince Alberic’ is indeed a coded homage to Oscar Wilde as Stetz argues, reading both ‘Prince Alberic’ and ‘Amour Dure’ alongside some of Wilde’s works reveals a shared investment for Lee and Wilde in refashioning historical materials to facilitate the expression of queer desire and non-​normative historical readings at the fin de siècle. Placing Lee’s work in conversation not only with Wilde, but also with works by E.M. Forster and Charles Ricketts in the latter portion of this chapter, we see a body of works across the long turn of the century that reveal the role of archaeological discourse in developing a queer iconography and shaping queer epistemologies of history, place, and texts.

‘A kind of spiritual and artistic sense’: Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx and The Portrait of Mr. W.H. In 1877, Oscar Wilde joined John Pentland Mahaffy, professor of Ancient History at Trinity College, Dublin, on a trip to Italy. In a March 1877 letter to his friend Reginald Harding, Wilde wrote: ‘I hope to see the golden dome of St Peter’s and the Eternal City by Tuesday night. This is an era in my life, a crisis. I wish I could look into the seeds of time and see what is coming.’82 After Mahaffy (in Wilde’s words) ‘carried [him] off to Greece with him to see Mykenae [sic] and Athens’ instead, the trip influenced Wilde in unexpected ways.83 He did not return to Oxford until after the term had begun. Biographers Harford Montgomery Hyde and Norbert Kohl note this trip as inspirational for Wilde’s growing distance from Christianity and heightening interest in the pagan past.84 But more, Wilde’s journey through ancient sites appears to have exacerbated a nascent fascination with the archaeological process. This early apprehension of ‘seeds of time’ as vessels of precious revelation reappears in important ways in the work he produced following this journey. In 1879, shortly after relocating to London from Oxford, Wilde eagerly sought an archaeological studentship in Athens, composing two letters to Archibald Sayce, a prominent Assyriologist and a family friend. In the first letter on 28 May, Wilde claims the studentship ‘would suit me so well’. In the second letter, on 8 December, Wilde writes: ‘I have done a good deal of travelling already, and from my boyhood have been accustomed, through my father, to visiting and reporting on ancient sites, taking rubbings and measurements, and all the technique of ordinary open air archaeologia.’85

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He continues, ‘It is of course a subject of intense interest to me, and I should give myself to it with a good deal of enthusiasm.’86 At Oxford, where Wilde had studied classics, archaeology was left out of the curriculum for fear that, as Iain Ross explains, ‘it would compromise the humanist, dialectical, text-​ based approach promoted there’.87 Wilde thus developed his archaeological enthusiasm elsewhere, likely in Ireland: from his father and his association with Trinity professor Mahaffy. His letters reveal that his life-​long interest in archaeology was both intellectual and personal, and fluidly interconnected with his other creative pursuits. While his application for an archaeological studentship was ultimately unsuccessful, in the same year Wilde joined the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (the Hellenic Society), attended by Sayce, Charles Newton (archaeologist of the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos and Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum), John Addington Symonds, and Heinrich Schliemann (the famed excavator of Troy). The aim of the Society, explains Ross, was ‘to rectify Britain’s deficiencies in those fields where Germany was ascendent [sic] … absolute mastery of every category of knowledge of the ancient world—​topographical, textual, archaeological, epigraphical’.88 The specialisation required for such a vast project, however, in its suppression of the cultivation of individual personality, ‘had ­consequences inimical to the kind of Hellenism promoted by Wilde’, claims Iain Ross.89 In what follows, I expand upon Ross’s work to suggest that the version of archaeological appreciation Wilde produces in his writing resolves these contradictions. Rummaging through the past for artefacts, landscapes, and imagery, Wilde appropriates material culture not to master the ancient world, but to produce new art and personal revelations in the present. ‘The Theatre at Argos’, first published in the Boston Pilot in 1879, was composed in situ during Wilde’s trip through Greece with Mahaffy.90 Many of the poems published in Wilde’s 1881 collection Poems reflect his growing passion for the Hellenic past and its material culture, as well as the troublesome place of archaeology in classical studies and art. Examples include ‘Charmides’, ‘Humanitad’ (composed in 1878–​79) and ‘Athanasia’ (originally published in 1879 and revised for Poems in 1881). Ross notes that in ‘Humanitad’, Wilde’s speaker ‘arraigns the insufficiency of Greek textual sources’, and consequently ‘seeks his ideal instead in Greek artefacts, specifically artefacts in national museums’, including the Parthenon frieze in the British Museum.91 ‘Athanasia’ begins with the image of a mummified girl being brought to the British Museum—​‘that gaunt House of Art which lacks for naught /​Of all the great things men have saved from Time’ (lines 1–​2). In this poem, Ross claims, ‘Wilde leavens Egyptology with allusions to Greek myth to invoke a generalised ancient world brought to life not by text but by the excavation and museum acquisition of Realien (“real things”), a

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life so vivid the modern world seems drab by comparison.’92 Clutched in the hand of the mummified girl in Wilde’s ‘Athanasia’ is a seed: ‘which sown in English ground /​Did wondrous snow of starry blossoms bear’ (lines 10–​11). Again, Wilde’s ‘seeds of time’ bring personal revelations: the modern author activates the futurity embedded within archaeological exploration. The excavated mummy bears the secrets of the past and produces beautiful new forms in the present. Over the next several years, Wilde developed his understanding of archaeology and its relationship to art. However, his travels through ancient Greek sites and subsequent fascination with archaeological excavation and imagery, along with the vivid proposition featured in ‘Athanasia’—​that archaeological excavation and objects can produce beautiful new things—​demands that we recognise archaeological discourse as foundational for Wilde’s aesthetic endeavours in the 1880s. In ‘The Truth of Masks’ (published in Nineteenth Century in 1885 and revised for Intentions in 1891), Wilde reclaims archaeology as a means of appropriating the past not to conserve or remember it, but to create something new. Praising the use of archaeology in recreating historical stage sets in Shakespeare’s time, he explains, ‘[T]‌he curious objects that were being constantly brought to light by excavations were not left to moulder in a museum, for the contemplation of a callous curator … They were used as motives for the production of a new art, which was to be not beautiful merely, but also strange.’93 Suggesting a dissonant aesthetic in the word ‘strange’ (and perhaps also in the word ‘curious’), Wilde posits a queer archaeology: he imagines that the suggestive materials of the past might be appropriated to expose untold stories and unconventional beauty. More than the beautiful varieties of Hellenic paganism and the homoeroticism of ancient Greece, the suggestive fragments of the ancient world opened up antiquity broadly to Wilde for the exploration of hidden histories, and the creation of new art. To transmute the materials of the ancient past, Wilde joined with his favourite stage designer and artist, Charles Ricketts. In what follows, I examine Ricketts’s central contributions to the literary and visual artefact of The Sphinx (1894). Though his role is not as obvious in The Portrait of Mr. W.H. (1889, 1921), Ricketts’s planned involvement in the expansion of the story is important for demonstrating Wilde’s conception of this work also as an archaeological object. Like Wilde, Ricketts was closely involved with archaeological discourse. With his partner Charles Shannon, Ricketts amassed a large collection of art objects, including archaeological items from Egypt. In fact, Ricketts’s final publication before his death was a review of The Art of Egypt, Through the Ages, published in The Observer on 16 August 1931. In this review, Ricketts laments the public’s growing indifference towards ancient Egypt, a rare society guided, in his words,

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by an ‘aesthetic impulse, divorced from utility’.94 Ricketts sees in ancient Egypt something like the aesthetic ideal Wilde and others found in the Italian Renaissance. He continues, ‘Despite the epoch-​making discoveries of our archaeologists, such as Sir Flinders Petrie and Mr. Howard Carter, an apathetic and somnolent British Museum has made the public indifferent to Egypt.’ Ricketts’s final publication invites us to consider his earlier illustrations and design for The Sphinx as composed while immersed in the discoveries of Petrie and Carter, and in the warm glow of Egyptomania. Together, Wilde and Ricketts reach back into antiquity to uncover queer identities and histories—​transforming the heterogeneous materials of the past into new and wonderfully strange art. In Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (2000), Nicholas Frankel asserts: ‘Nobody reads The Sphinx nowadays.’95 While Wilde’s 1894 poem has certainly received less critical consideration than many of his works, Frankel’s more pressing claim is that this dearth of scholarship results from editors’ tendency to anthologise the poem alongside other texts in Wilde’s oeuvre, thus divorcing the poem from its visual accompaniment—​ Charles Ricketts’s design and illustrations produced for the volume’s initial publication.96 Ricketts’s design and decorations are not supplementary material, but are rather one with the text and, as Frankel claims, ‘As a result, reading the poem becomes a kind of archaeological encounter, in which the poem takes on properties usually associated with a decorative artifact.’97 The Sphinx’s ‘decorated condition’ is ‘a sign of the poem’s archaeological aspirations’ and, Frankel argues, ‘The poem needs to be imagined along more thoroughly archaeological lines.’98 Although published in book form in 1894, The Sphinx was begun at Oxford between 1874 and 1878, and nearly completed in Paris in 1883, placing its composition squarely within Wilde’s early experiences with emerging disciplinary debates over archaeology. Even after such a long composition process, the printing of the work was further delayed up to two years while Ricketts created the decorations.99 Building on Frankel’s exhortations to foreground the ‘governing archaeological conceit’ of The Sphinx and thus recognising the indivisibility of text, decoration, and book, this section will demonstrate how The Sphinx not only enacts a textual process of archaeological excavation, but also employs that process in the service of exhibiting transgressive sexual possibility. Appropriating the suggestive landscape and mythography of Egypt and Greece, Wilde and Ricketts turn to imagery of stratigraphy, fragmentation, burial, and dust to create a fitting setting for illicit activity and desire. The Sphinx depicts actual archaeological spaces, and their psychic analogues, as both temporally and sexually transgressive.

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Together, the text, illustrations, and beautiful binding of The Sphinx combine to create a singular material artefact. Bound in an ivory cover with gold stamped images, the book itself recalls golden treasures unearthed from the sands of Egypt. The forty-​four large white pages, composed of handmade and watermarked paper, feature lines printed in black all-​capitals, and the pages feature inconsistent numbers of lines. Ricketts’s images are printed in rust red ink, while catchwords and decorated initials are green. This stunning work—​absolutely overflowing with allusions to a multiplicity of ancient creatures, myths, and physical spaces, along with the generalised locales of ancient ruin and fantasy designed by Ricketts—​is a messy, dense heap of ancient imagery.100 Contemplating a sphinx figurine in his room, the speaker of The Sphinx begins by considering her ‘thousand weary centuries’ of experience, and then embarks upon an extensive sensual catalogue imagining all of the sphinx’s former lovers (l.17). The use of archaeological discourse to imagine a line of transhistorical sexual forays anticipates Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), which I explore in the following chapter, and which further demonstrates the extent to which archaeology facilitated aesthetic experimentation and the exploration of sexual possibility. Throughout Wilde’s The Sphinx, the diversity of the sphinx’s paramours points to all manner of unconventional relationships, while simultaneously embedding queer resonances in the rich language of multicultural myth. Published by the Bodley Head shortly before Wilde’s 1895 trial, the poem, surprisingly, was not summoned as evidence against him. However, as Ruth Robbins notes, the poem resembles in many ways the works that were, for ‘it gives voice to actions which should be neither spoken nor performed’.101 Addressing the sphinx, the speaker wonders, ‘But you can read the hieroglyphs on the great sandstone obelisks, /​And you have talked with Basilisks, and you have looked on Hippogriffs’, indicating that the sphinx is privy to the meanings hidden in coded languages, and has had congress with mysterious creatures (lines 19–​20). ‘Who were your lovers?’ the speaker asks. ‘[W]‌ho were they who wrestled for you in the dust? /​Which was the vessel of your lust? what leman had you, every day?’ (lines 45–​46). The speaker, whom scholars have read as a student at Oxford, receives no response from the sphinx, who, claims Frankel, ‘finally remains as silent and unknown as at the beginning’.102 Frankel positions the speaker as a frustrated archaeologist: ‘The excesses of Orientalist myth, projected onto the sphinx as “poisonous melodies” (l. 155), are finally no match for the “steadfast gaze” and “sullen ways” of an archaeological object whose very silence seems to stand in judgment on the speaker’s ignorance.’ Frankel’s

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reading of the speaker’s disappointment derives from the poem’s difficult conclusion, in which the student pushes the sphinx away: ‘Get hence, you loathsome mystery!’103 And yet, I want to suggest that the silence of the archaeological object is not entirely frustrating; the poem’s bitter conclusion does not negate the archaeological fantasies in which the bulk of the text indulges. The sphinx in the poem instead functions as a site of ‘undetonated energy’ to use Freeman’s term—​an enticingly suggestive fragment which brings forth radical interpretations and imaginings from the student himself. Seizing upon the gendered, sexual, and temporal fluidity of the sphinx figure, as well as the suggestive associations between archaeology and sexuality, The Sphinx utters, and even depicts, non-​normative sexual desires. Wilde’s choice of a sphinx for his subject, as well as the more specific decisions he and Ricketts made in its representation, point to key ways this ancient figure offered itself up for queer reconstructions. The conceptual malleability of the ancient sphinx lends her power as a symbolic secret keeper, or as secrecy itself. Amidst the catalogue of possible sexual engagements, the speaker asks: ‘[H]‌ad you shameful secret quests …?’ (lines 53–​54). Wilde’s poem manoeuvres within this vague symbolic triangulation between the sphinx, sex, and secrecy, subverting normative sexual desire through a catalogue of hypothetical sexual liaisons repeatedly characterised by the poem’s speaker as secret. Additionally, Robbins suggests that in Wilde’s poem the sphinx’s ‘perverse shape—​a form which is between woman and beast … permits the poetic persona to travel as far as possible from the exigencies of the here and now’.104 The sphinx’s beautiful hybridity—​the speaker calls her an ‘exquisite grotesque’—​provides rich ambiguity and delightful perversity at a remove from real life (line 12). While the poem is set in a fantastical vaguely Egyptian/​Middle Eastern space which stereotypically aligns with Said’s characterisation of Western approaches to the Orient—​an imaginative space suggesting ‘sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies’—​Wilde also infuses the poem with clearly Greek associations.105 Wilde’s insertion of a female sphinx within a recognisably Egyptian mythography presents a curious merging of the Greek sphinx—​female—​with the Egyptian sphinx—​typically male. While the riddling Greek sphinx conjures images of ravenous aggression, treachery, and manipulation, the ancient Egyptian male sphinx (always without wings) usually represents more benevolent traits, and serves often as a majestic guardian. Melding the Greek and Egyptian sphinx, Wilde conjures the rich associations of both: the aggressive, dangerous, and fatally alluring female of Greek myth becomes even more seductive and deeply ancient alongside the Orientalised imagery of ancient Egypt.

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Figure 1.2  Frontispiece, Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, 1894, illustrated and decorated by Charles Ricketts.

The frontispiece for The Sphinx features a network of twined branches with thorns and grape bunches [Figure 1.2]. On the left, a draped figure indicated as Melancholia, her breast exposed, gazes languidly down and across at the androgynous sphinx while she nibbles from a bunch of grapes.

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The sphinx, perched on one of the branches with muscular arms and stretching upward, opens her mouth to taste the fruit. Ricketts’s sphinx is indeed an ‘exquisite grotesque’. She most closely resembles the Greek sphinx, with lion’s haunches and tail, feathered wings, and human female breasts. But because both her face and her muscular torso are masculine in appearance, Ricketts’s sphinx appears strikingly androgynous beside the traditionally feminine Melancholia. Throughout the book, the sphinx appears in a variety of postures, stretching, reaching for grapes, and striding through her ancient landscape—​leading the poem’s speaker, as well as the poem’s reader, through spaces which only faintly resemble the specific references of the poem. Ricketts’s images are not, therefore, direct visual translations of the poem’s content. Large blank spaces on the pages, a blankness accentuated by Ricketts’s spare, stark graphic style, both highlight the expense of the book as a fine art object and invite the reader to fill these spaces with our own visual or conceptual material, much like the speaker does himself. Several images later in the text feature heavy stone structures, already broken and falling in the text’s vague setting. The images actually suggest that the sphinx leads the speaker through modern sites of ancient ruin, rather than taking him imaginatively into the ancient past. The fantasy, it seems, is in the encounter with fragments and ruins, not in the historical space perfectly reconstructed. In this way, the images present a sort of asynchrony, in which the text’s reader feels like an archaeologist plodding through ancient ruins, accompanied by a mythological creature at home in the original space of those structures. Another figure [Figure 1.3], in which the sphinx disappears halfway behind the large broken columns of an archway while Melancholia follows behind, particularly suggests the crossing of a temporal threshold, where ruin lies both before and behind. Yet, a live plant erupts from the fissures in the stone, suggesting that new life emerges from the interstices of past and present. On the right side of another illustration [Figure 1.4], broken stones create an image of a seated human figure, an ivy-​like plant in his lap, again suggesting aesthetic fecundity in ancient materials. The figure looks down at the creature, while she gazes back up at him. This panel appears to illustrate the poem’s ‘gaunt Memnon’, who ‘from his chair of porphyry … strains his lidless eyes’ (line 133). The large stone fragments piled at the figure’s feet invite the possibility of constructing something new, a practice Wilde identified as archaeology’s most essential value. The poem likewise catalogues archaeological locations to envision the physical spaces of transgression. For example, the speaker refers to the ‘­caverns of [Ammon’s] ears’ into which the sphinx whispers ‘monstrous oracles’, and imagines pyramids and brothels, asking whether the sphinx did ‘slink into the vault and make the pyramid your lúpanar /​Till

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Figure 1.3  Illustration, ‘Go Seek’, Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, 1894, illustrated and decorated by Charles Ricketts.

from each black sarcophagus rose up the painted swathed dead’ (lines 83, 62). While the 1894 edition of the text features no Egyptian pyramids, Ricketts’s 1923 series accompanies these lines with recognisably Egyptian imagery. In Figure 1.5, for example, the sphinx appears creeping down the sides of a pyramid, gazing into a cavern beneath the structure. A swathed corpse seems to float vertically just beneath the sphinx’s head. The sphinx

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Figure 1.4  Illustration, ‘And Nilus’, Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, 1894, illustrated and decorated by Charles Ricketts.

does not quite reach the corpse, visually representing a deferral of physical contact that leaves room for suggestion and anticipation. Another sketch (which did not come to a final draft) for the second series features the sphinx striding confidently before three pyramids.106 Wilde’s poem and the images from the second series demonstrate the fin-​de-​siècle fantasy

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Figure 1.5  Illustration draft, ‘Rose up the painted swathed dead’, for Oscar Wilde’s The Sphinx, by Charles Ricketts, second series, 1923.

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of secrecy and transgression in the mysterious spaces beneath the pyramids. In a second example from The Sphinx, the speaker asks, ‘[F]‌rom that brick-​built Lycian tomb what horrible Chimaera came […] To breed new wonders from your womb?’ (lines 51–​52).107 The idea of a hybrid creature emerging from a tomb to birth ‘new wonders’, again metaphorically realises the fin-​de-​siècle fantasy of turning to the ancient past to create modern forms. Each encounter with The Sphinx exposes some fresh allusion which the reader did not catch before, rendering absolute understanding of Wilde’s historical references both impossible and beside the point. Wilde’s poem and Ricketts’s designs demand a unique reading process. First, as Frankel notes, because ‘we are not accustomed to reading poetry as a corporate event, with no discernible hierarchy between the work of printer, binder, compositor, graphic designer, and writer’, we must learn to read text and material object together, much like nineteenth-​century historians were either learning to do, or resisting.108 Such a multimodal aesthetic process certainly looks back to the Pre-​Raphaelites, and also develops out of the tradition of William Morris’s press. Frankel notes, ‘While it is possible to overstate the influence of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press on The Sphinx, there can be little doubt that Kelmscott Press books (which entered production in 1891) set a benchmark or precedent by which Charles Ricketts … must have measured his ideas.’109 However, Ricketts’s design for The Sphinx invites a type of reading that perhaps the Pre-​Raphaelite works and the Kelmscott books do not. In addition to addressing the volume as an artefact, the reader must approach the heap of imagery and text through a process of excavation, or sifting, to arrive at a still-​elusive (or coded) meaning—​an elusiveness that is highlighted by the vast white spaces in the text, like desert sands to be sifted. The layout of the text also encourages this kind of process: by block-​printing the long couplet lines in all caps, the text suggests a kind of stratigraphic uniformity only occasionally broken up by a word or two overspilling the limits of the line. W.E. Henley, poet and editor of the Scots Observer, and unrelenting critic of Wilde’s work, noted the layout of the text, and the mysterious result of such a design: [E]‌ighty-​five couplets by Mr. Oscar Wilde, all printed in small caps and in decent black. Also, the distribution of these precious eighty-​five… . [F]or on one page there are as many as nine, and on another there are as few as one, and on another you shall count some five, and on another yet are four, or six, or two, as Providence hath willed. And the reason thereof let no man seek to know; for, if he do, the half of it shall not be told to him.110

Henley imagines the book as a site whose layout invites frustration, demands excavation, and yet conceals meaning. In the end, the sphinx herself, and

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the obscure arrangement of the text, remain respectively out of the speaker’s and reader’s control. As the poem reaches its frantic and frustrating conclusion, the speaker’s visions of the sphinx’s trysts reaches a fever pitch. He imagines her attacking first a lion and then a tiger in rapid succession, apparently trying to direct the sphinx to ‘smite [the tiger] with your jasper claws! and bruise him with your agate breasts!’ (line 148). Suddenly—​perhaps alarmed by his own fervour—​the speaker exclaims: ‘Why are you tarrying? Get hence! I weary of your sullen ways, /​I weary of your steadfast gaze, your somnolent magnificence’ (lines 149–​150). The sphinx appears to be reading him with her gaze, refusing to reveal her own secrets, but now privy to his own hidden desires. The many secrets of the sphinx must stay provocatively intangible, while the process of excavating into the past has been a revelation for the speaker or encounterer. The significance of the archaeological sphinx to Wilde’s work is memorialised in his own tomb at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris—​a sphinx-​ like structure designed by Jacob Epstein and inspired by Egyptian, Indian, and Assyrian sphinxes displayed at the British Museum. Ellen Crowell explores the history behind this monument, positioning Epstein’s sphinx against another proposed design created by Ricketts in 1905. Ricketts’s small bronze statuette, entitled Silence, closely resembles in its hood and draping the Melancholia figure in his illustrations for The Sphinx as well as the Greek Tanagra statuettes admired by both Wilde and Ricketts. Crowell asserts, ‘Whereas Epstein’s choice stresses a heroic solitude—​the future-​oriented figure in half-​flight from a hostile present—​Ricketts’s choice highlights relationality, community, and loss.’111 Melancholia’s presence as a companion or follower of the sphinx through ancient sites suggests that Wilde’s poem functions not only as an evocative sensual catalogue of unconventional sexual possibilities, but invites us to read it (text and images together) as a sorrowful monument to the fragility of those possibilities in the face of shifting historicisms. The fact that these two images dominate the aesthetic project of memorialising Wilde speaks to the significance of the often-​neglected The Sphinx in Wilde’s oeuvre, and further demonstrates how archaeological imagery facilitated a community of queer artists at the turn of the twentieth century. Though Wilde’s own effort to ‘fill with the new wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn’ was cut short, his tomb, like his poem, bears witness to the power of archaeological imagery and processes to register queer experience and imagine more beautiful futures.112 In June 1893, Wilde wrote to Ricketts requesting a proof of The Sphinx, explaining, ‘I want to see if I could make the whole poem longer’—​pointing

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to how the poem’s catalogue suggests ongoing Decadent possibility in its very excess.113 Then, after praising Charles Shannon’s set design for Lady Windemere’s Fan, he concludes the letter with a question about ‘Mr. W.H.’, which was forthcoming in an enlarged edition with a planned frontispiece to be designed by Ricketts. So, although The Sphinx and The Portrait of Mr. W.H. are not often read in conjunction with one another, Wilde was clearly working on them at the same time. Wilde’s Mr. W.H. likewise addresses secret desire, though it does so through language and imagery more coded than that of The Sphinx. However, keeping in mind the way sexual transgression is linked to archaeology in The Sphinx, we can more clearly see how Mr. W.H. presents its own queer appropriation of material artefacts. Published in Blackwood’s in 1889, the text was revised and expanded by 1893, but was not published in the longer form addressed here until 1921 by Mitchell Kennerley in New York. The story begins with a portrait. A man named Erskine tells the unnamed narrator of his friend Cyril Graham, who theorised that Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed to a boy actor named Willie Hughes. Relying very little on ‘demonstrable proof or formal evidence’, Erskine claims Cyril’s theory initially depended ‘on a kind of spiritual and artistic sense, by which alone he claimed could the true meaning of the poems be discerned’.114 After an obsessive quest to substantiate his claims, during which he eventually commissioned a forged Elizabethan portrait of Hughes, Cyril committed suicide in the name of his cause. The narrator then details his own obsession with the Hughes premise, expounding upon the neo-​Platonic love between Shakespeare and Hughes—​a queer connection that expands to form a community including Cyril and the narrator. In the narrator’s own excavation of this relationship, he experiences a transtemporal textual intimacy that facilitates self-​revelation. However, the story suggests that recovering neglected histories is best only for these personal revelations, that such counter-​histories must rely on ‘a kind of spiritual and artistic sense’ that is other; when pursued for the sake of empiricism and traditional histories, such archaeological explorations necessarily fail, and personal connections are fractured. Wilde’s expansions after 1889 mainly involve the narrator’s investigational process: his research on the history of Renaissance boy actors; his enquiry into the nature of Shakespeare’s relationship to the ‘dark lady’; his speculation on the cause of Hughes’s death; and contextualising discussions of Neo-​Platonism and Hellenism. Like Cyril’s ‘spiritual and artistic sense, by which alone he claimed could the true meaning of the poems be discerned’, the narrator develops a singular way of reading the materials at hand—​a queer enquiry into multiple layers of non-​normative history. Early in his research, the narrator begins to read the sonnets collectively in a new

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way. Whereas before he found them ‘things quite alien to Shakespeare’s development as a dramatist’, he now ‘saw that the moods and passions they mirrored were absolutely essential to Shakespeare’s perfection as an artist’. Employing lines from Love’s Labour’s Lost, the narrator calls ‘these wonderful Sonnets, “Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical /​As bright Apollo’s lute” ’. Invoking the secrecy of the sphinx to suggest something hidden in the poems’ content, and invoking the male beauty of Apollo (as opposed to Sappho and her lyre), the narrator imagines the sonnets as vital to Shakespeare’s life and work, ‘reveal[ing] to us something of the secret of his method’.115 The narrator regularly addresses traditional interpretations of the sonnets only to dismiss them in favour of Cyril’s theory. He explains, ‘[I]‌t is only when we realise the influence of neo-​Platonism on the Renaissance that we can understand the true meaning of the amatory phrases and words with which friends were wont, at this time, to address each other.’116 There is a key, a way of reading the sonnets that traditional critics have never found, through which the narrator uncovers the truth of Shakespeare’s love for Willie Hughes. This way of reading not only unlocks mysteries of the past but reveals the narrator to himself: ‘[I]t seemed to me that I was deciphering the story of a life that had once been mine, unrolling the record of a romance that, without my knowing it, had coloured the very texture of my nature.’117 Describing the role of art in the realisation of personality, the narrator claims that art shows us not ‘the external world’ but only ‘our own soul’, which ‘is to each one of us a mystery’.118 To illustrate this claim, the narrator imagines himself in the theatres of Shakespeare’s time, which Wilde associated with archaeological reconstruction. Envisioning the clothing of the actors and the stage, the narrator of Mr. W.H. states: ‘I had lived it all.’ ‘And yet it was in this century that it had all happened’, he marvels, pointing to a kind of historical simultaneity facilitated by both art and, obliquely, by archaeology.119 Pondering how this intimacy between past and present is possible, the narrator theorises that the soul, with its hidden desires, exists out of time, or, more accurately, in many times at once: There was something within us that knew nothing of sequence or extension, and yet, … was the spectator of all time and of all existence. It had senses that quickened, passions that came to birth, spiritual ecstasies of contemplation, ardours of fiery-​coloured love. It was we who were unreal, and our conscious life was the least important part of our development. The soul, the secret soul, was the only reality.120

In this passage, the narrator indicates that encounters with the art of the past reveal the ‘secret soul’, replete with passions more real than those we

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experience as conscious life. ‘How curiously it had all been revealed to me!’ the narrator exclaims. ‘A book of sonnets, published nearly three hundred years ago, written by a dead hand and in honour of a dead youth, had suddenly explained to me the whole story of my soul’s romance.’ Emphasising through repetition the idea that the dead convey revelatory messages to the living, the narrator then moves directly (without even a paragraph break) into his memory of the opening of an Egyptian coffin ‘that had been found in one of the basalt tombs at Thebes’.121 In this direct transition from meditation on the secret soul to meditation on an archaeological relic, Wilde implicitly links this moment of archaeological encounter to a theory of art as conduit to the secret soul. The narrator describes the mummified young woman inside the sarcophagus, clutching a scroll of papyrus in her hand, recalling Wilde’s earlier poem ‘Athanasia’ in which the ‘body of a girl’ is found ‘by lonely Arabs lying hid /​ In the dim womb of some black pyramid’ (lines 3, 5–​6). Significantly using ‘womb’ where ‘tomb’ might be expected, Wilde foregrounds the generative possibilities of tomb exploration—​the seed in the hand of the mummy—​an idea he returns to in Mr. W.H. The story’s narrator wishes the mummy’s scroll could have been read to him: ‘It might have told me something more about the soul that hid within me, and had its mysteries of passion of which I was kept in ignorance. Strange, that we knew so little about ourselves, and that our most intimate personality was concealed from us! Were we to look in tombs for our real life, and in art for the legend of our days?’122 This passage, which is discussed in my introduction, exhibits the potential of archaeological material to reveal one’s ‘most intimate personality’, otherwise concealed from self-​knowledge. When read alongside Wilde’s previous use of the Egyptian tomb as a trysting place in The Sphinx, these ‘mysteries of passion’ take on a more erotic charge. While this reflection on the mummy encounter follows the narrator’s meditation on Shakespearean theatre and the secret soul, the theatre section is also closely preceded by another discussion of tombs. Lingering upon the ignominy of earthly burial—​‘The ivory body of the Bithynian slave rots in the green ooze of the Nile, and on the yellow hills of the Cerameicus is strewn the dust of the young Athenian’—​ in order to glorify the timeless tomb of art, Wilde nonetheless invites the reader to consider those less familiar figures buried and forgotten in the sands of time.123 Therefore, both the asynchronous theatre experience and the ‘secret soul’ passages in Mr. W.H. are flanked by archaeological imagery, pointing to the significance of Wilde’s archaeological imagination in his aesthetic quest for personality and a beautiful life that imitates art. The queer community which forms around the Willie Hughes premise is ruptured at two key moments in the story: the first, when Erskine points to

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Cyril’s commission of the portrait as evidence of Cyril’s disbelief in his own theory, resulting shortly thereafter in his suicide; the second, when the narrator sends the results of his enquiry to Erskine in a letter, and immediately loses his own belief in the theory. In the first instance, the text calls into question the relationship between material culture and historical or personal truth. Having obsessively sought proof of Hughes, the boy actor with whom the young actor Cyril identifies, Cyril’s commission of the portrait can be read as an effort to prove his own existence, and seek validation for his own secret desires.124 When the forgery is exposed, Cyril tells Erskine that he commissioned the portrait only for Erskine’s sake, arguing, ‘It does not affect the truth of the theory.’ Erskine responds: ‘The truth of the theory! […] You never even believed in it yourself. If you had, you would not have committed a forgery to prove it.’ The forgery exposed, Cyril ends his life. Considering Cyril’s death, we might come to the conclusion that the portrait could only be a lie while Cyril was alive; since Cyril is himself a sort of aesthetic reproduction of Willie Hughes, the two could not exist together. His suicide note claims that his death should serve ‘to show [Erskine] how firm and flawless his faith in the whole thing was’.125 This episode thus presents the desperate desire for the material past to validate or manifest a personal truth in the present. However, it also suggests the problems of reconstructing queer stories in terms of evidence, endeavouring to fit them into rigid (straight) linear historiographies. The story of Shakespeare’s love for Willie Hughes cannot fill a gap in a normative historical record, and is instead best appreciated by those readers gifted with the unique ‘spiritual and artistic sense’ to perceive it. In a second moment of fracture within the story’s queer collective, the narrator repeats Cyril’s mistake and sends Erskine his own written testament of the Hughes theory—​another self-​portrait in a different genre. Immediately, he feels he has ‘given away [his] capacity for belief’, and that ‘something had gone out of’ him.126 He ponders the reasons for this change: ‘Had I touched upon some secret that my soul desired to conceal?’ and then t­heorises: ‘Influence is simply a transference of personality, a mode of giving away what is most precious to one’s self.’127 In finally and fully expressing his own Willie Hughes theory, the narrator feels that he has given away part of himself. After sending the letter, the narrator claims that ‘Willie Hughes suddenly became to me a mere myth … the boyish fancy of a young man who, like most ardent spirits, was more anxious to convince others than to be himself convinced.’128 The narrator’s sudden change of heart not only signals a distrust of empiricism, but even more tragically, might suggest that he has been cured of his ‘boyish fancy’—​no longer even owning up to his desire to be convinced himself. His exhaustive critical

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engagement with the Hughes story, and perhaps more importantly his publication of that engagement, seems to have emptied the story of its more significant personal meaning. The capacity of archaeological excavation to unearth and expose queer histories—​or the secret soul—​becomes meaningless when utilised for empirical purposes in traditional histories, for the ‘secret soul’ is ‘the only reality’, and is tragically disfigured when implanted in normative structures. In his typical fashion, Wilde contradicts such an interpretation himself; he commissioned a portrait of Willie Hughes for the frontispiece to the enlarged edition of Mr. W.H., which was not published in his lifetime. He turned to Ricketts, as Ricketts remembered years later, requesting ‘a small Elizabethan picture—​something in the manner of, shall we say, Clouet’.129 Ricketts recalls creating the portrait on ‘a decaying piece of oak and fram[ing] it in a fragment of worm-​eaten moulding, which my friend Shannon pieced together’.130 In commissioning a portrait complete with archaeological decay, Wilde playfully impersonates his character Cyril Graham. His endeavour to accompany his story with the portrait suggests that like The Sphinx, Wilde wanted Mr. W.H. to be an artefact, rather than a mere text—​an embodiment of the archaeological fantasy indulged in by Cyril, packaged for his own readers. Ricketts apparently had concerns about the forged nature of his frontispiece. After seeing the finished portrait in the Autumn of 1889, Wilde wrote to his friend: ‘My dear Ricketts, It is not a forgery at all; it is an authentic Clouet of the highest artistic value.’131 Here, Wilde emphasises the difference between historical and artistic value, assuring Ricketts that the painting holds the pure authenticity of being beautiful art reconstructed from fragments of the past. Unfortunately for contemporary readers, the portrait has been lost. Sold at the bankruptcy auction after Wilde’s incarceration, the portrait transferred to a London bookseller, and has since disappeared—​an archaeological treasure waiting to be discovered.132 In The Sphinx and The Portrait of Mr. W.H., Wilde appropriates archaeological material and the archaeological process in ways vital to understanding the texts themselves. Reproducing something akin to what Wilde saw in stage designs during Shakespeare’s time—​when ‘the curious objects that were being constantly brought to light by excavations were not left to moulder in a museum’, but ‘were used as motives for the production of a new art, which was to be not beautiful merely, but also strange’—​these works draw from archaeological discourse to uncover ‘strange’ secrets and radical sexual possibilities.133 Both works present readers with epistemological models through which one might uncover non-​ normative erotic potential in the items of the past, and use these materials to imagine new

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opportunities for the present and future. The following section reaches into the twentieth century to examine how, like Lee and Wilde, E.M. Forster experimented with queer archaeology in his texts. Rejecting Hellenism as the only historical discourse capable of facilitating non-​normative sexualities, Forster’s works demonstrate that expressions of queerness are bound up in approaches to the ancient past, as well as in the ways we encounter and aestheticise historical land-​and cityscapes.

‘Archaeological and other reading’: E.M. Forster’s Maurice and Pharos and Pharillon Referring to a 1929 essay on Marcel Proust, in which Forster describes Proust as ‘the hero starting out to be an author, rummaging in his past, disinterring forgotten facts’, Judith Scherer Herz compares Forster himself to his sketch: ‘Forster was, indeed, an archaeologist of the human experience.’ She continues: ‘[A]‌ll his writing, fiction and non-​fiction alike, constitutes an exploration, a recovery, and finally the creation of the past … But Forster’s past is never entirely personal, never uniquely his alone. For, even when it is personal, it is public as well: a collective past explored by way of constituting an individual present.’134 Herz addresses Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon (1923) as the ‘most intricate example of this manner of recovering the past’.135 However, Forster’s engagement with archaeological discourse as an instrument for expanding our conception of the human experience began years before either of these works. While Herz notes Forster’s experiments with ‘eroticized readings of the past’ in earlier essays like ‘The Tomb of Pletone’ and ‘Macolnia Shops’, my reading considers Forster’s archaeological approach in Pharos and Pharillon in relation to his novel Maurice, composed between 1913 and 1914, when Wilde’s imprisonment still lingered in public memory. Richard Dellamora has noted that Wilde’s tragic end ‘permanently affected’ Forster personally and registered in his work.136 Recently, Maurice has received heightened critical attention, some of which addresses the archaeological and/​or artefactual qualities of the novel. For example, Jonah Corne argues, ‘[T]hroughout his writing Forster invests certain zones of ruination with a queer erotic energy, a variously submerged current of same-​sex desire that troubles the idea that his fragments ceaselessly cry out for wholeness and restitution.’137 Corne’s examination of Maurice focuses on linguistic fragments and the problem of futurity, closely reading the conversation between Maurice and Clive about children through and against Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). My reading focuses on the more direct references to historical and archaeological ruin in the text, including the novel’s

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(arguable) climax—​Maurice’s meeting with his lover Alec in the British Museum. While scholars like Barbara Black and Ruth Hoberman read this scene as an example of institutional museum space subverted by individuals and their unsanctioned desire, I suggest that the scene in the British Museum is an apotheosis of the novel’s sustained examination of archaeological discourse as a language of queer desire. In its subversive employment of ancient materials, the museum scene in Maurice can be understood as a jumping-​off point for Forster’s later excavations of non-​normative histories. Maurice establishes Forster as an inheritor of the queer archaeologies undertaken by Lee and Wilde. Like these fin-​de-​siècle writers, Forster was conflicted about, if not directly oppositional towards, the imperial ideologies that governed the museum institution. In his 1920 review of a memoir by Sir Wallis Budge (Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum from 1894 to 1924), entitled ‘For the Museum’s Sake’, Forster condemns European, especially British, smuggling of artefacts, arguing that these ‘old objects’ ‘breathe their dead words into too dead an ear’, in a present where ‘interest in the past is mainly faked’. He adds, ‘It was different in the Renaissance’, recalling Wilde’s preference for Renaissance archaeology.138 Whereas Ricketts lamented what he saw as widespread apathy towards archaeological discoveries in the twentieth century, Forster disparaged a forged and opportunistic fascination with the past, assumed for the sake of imperial gain. In his writings from the early twentieth century, Forster experiments with an approach to the past that undermines imperialistic, normative British methods of historical appropriation. In the war years immediately following the composition of Maurice, Forster (a conscientious objector) volunteered for the International Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt during which time he worked on Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922), and Pharos and Pharillon (1923). In what follows, I read Maurice as an inauguration of Forster’s appropriation of the ancient past as facilitator for the expression of radical sexual possibility, one which continues in his nonfiction Pharos and Pharillon, with which this chapter concludes. Maurice, which relates a young man’s romantic relationships with two men, was not published until 1971—​a year after Forster’s death and only four years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain. A note on the 1960 typescript of Maurice reads: ‘Publishable—​but worth it?’139 Forster writes in the ‘Terminal Note’ to the text, also composed in 1960, ‘Unless the Wolfenden Report becomes law, it will probably have to remain in ­manuscript.’140 The Wolfenden Report, which recommended that consensual ‘homosexual behaviour’ between adults be decriminalised, was published in 1957, after several prominent men in Britain had been convicted of homosexual offenses. The report spurred public debate, and contributed

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to the eventual decriminalisation of homosexual acts ten years later.141 Thus, the fictional experience of Maurice Hall in Forster’s novel—​which Forster hopefully ‘Dedicated to a Happier Year’—​is rooted in the years just before the First World War, but also pertinent to the controversies of the mid twentieth century when it was published. In a novel conceptually indebted, in my reading, to both Lee and Wilde, Forster turns to archaeological discourse to express a young gay man’s self-​exploration. In the process, this novel simultaneously gestures to the wider, public possibilities assisted by the archaeological imagination. Rejecting Hellenism as the only historical throughline for the expression of same-​sex love, Maurice demonstrates how one’s approach to history and its material culture broadly can subvert normative discourse and facilitate the expression of non-​normative sexuality, while simultaneously dismantling class and national hierarchies. Leading up to the often-​addressed museum scene, Maurice directs his younger, working-​class lover Alec in a letter to meet him at the British Museum: ‘a large building. Anyone will tell you which.’ Expecting Alec to blackmail him, Maurice selects the massive institution for its supposed safety, thinking to himself, ‘Poor B.M., solemn and chaste!’142 Barbara Black calls the museum a ‘home field’ for Maurice, familiar to him from his education and class, and foreign to Alec.143 The day of the meeting, the narrator describes the weather as so dark and rainy ‘that some of the lights had been turned on inside, and the great building suggested a tomb, miraculously illuminated by spirits of the dead’.144 Within this illuminating light, Maurice and Alec will dissolve the tensions placed on them by their rigid society and will perceive their love for each other, the ‘spirits of the dead’ leading them to a more promising future. Within the museum, the class barrier between Maurice and Alec is initially emphasised, while their natural intimacy works to break through societal constraints. Alec asks, ‘What’s all this place?’ to which Maurice responds, ‘Old things belonging to the nation.’145 The text first reminds the reader of the museum’s nationalistic status and function only to undermine it in the episodes that follow. While Alec awaits an opportunity in their conversation to commence his feeble blackmail plans, Maurice remains calm. The anxiety between the men breaks when Alec is suddenly struck by the sight of ‘a winged Assyrian bull’, one of the two similar chimaeric monuments that inspired Rossetti’s questioning of empire in ‘The Burden of Nineveh’ (discussed in my introduction). Alec wonders over the bull’s manufacturing process: ‘They must have owned wonderful machinery to make a thing like that.’146 His working-​class attentiveness to the bull’s construction subtly challenges the museum institution’s overarching project to civilise the lower classes. Rather than marvelling in the object’s beauty or seeing in it the power of the British empire, Alec exposes the working-​class

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base that makes the building of national monuments possible. Maurice notes a second bull, and they realise that each of the bulls appears to have five legs. ‘A curious idea’, marvels Alec. Then, ‘Standing each by his monster, they looked at each other, and smiled.’147 The narrator aligns each man with his own Assyrian bull, and Maurice and Alec smile in solidarity with each other and mockery at what their society deems ‘monstrous’ in themselves. Black claims, ‘Maurice and Alec find [the bulls] alluring because of their masculinity, virility… and deviance or monstrosity.’ The smile between the men, she explains, a ‘pornographic gloss in the house of official culture … suggests the bulls are an objective correlative for Maurice’s renunciation of Western rationalism in favor of a sensuality that is Eastern and heterodox.’148 Additionally, the ‘fifth leg’ of each bull, a perspectival anomaly that allows for the phallic joke, speaks to Forster’s frustration with the censorship of Greek art. Referring in ‘For the Museum’s Sake’ to the recovery of antiquities in the fifteenth century, Forster decries how ‘[t]‌he objects—​mainly statues—​were routed out of the earth, treated with acids and equipped with fig-​leaves and tin petticoats’.149 In opposition to the fig-​ leaved Grecian men, the Assyrian bulls represent a virile, positive primitivism, what Forster identifies in the ‘Terminal Note’ as Edward Carpenter’s advocacy for ‘the reintegration of something primitive into the common stock’, an illustration of what Carpenter and Forster hoped the public might recognise, or at least understand, about desire between men.150 The two men continue to ramble through the museum, ‘as if in search of something. They would peer at a goddess or vase, then move at a single impulse, and their unison was the stranger because on the surface they were at war.’151 Wandering through what Black calls ‘the house of official culture’, Maurice and Alex share an instinctive inner rhythm while outwardly exchanging the antagonistic dialogue that heteronormative convention forces them to assume. While gazing at a model of the Acropolis, the men encounter Maurice’s former teacher, Mr Ducie, the man who teaches Maurice about heterosexual sex in the novel’s first chapter. When Ducie recognises his former pupil, asking whether his name is ‘Hall’, Maurice lies, taking Alec’s last name, ‘Scudder’, as his own—​a symbolic gesture to their eventual decision to remain together, the ‘happy ending’ that Forster writes in the ‘Terminal Note’ was ‘imperative’.152 When their argument reaches an apex, still among the Greek collection, Alec’s ‘colouring stood out against the heroes, perfect but bloodless’.153 Here, Forster foils the modern Alec—​ agile, aggressive, and imperfect—​with the bland, flawless heroes of Greek myth. When Maurice confesses his love, the ‘rows of old statues tottered’.154 Ruth Hoberman asserts, ‘Forster uses the museum setting to evoke not only the oppression of the state and outmoded values, as suggested by those “old statues” linked to a classical education and a bloodless, Platonic Hellenism,

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but also a potential queerness embedded in the stones themselves, revealed when they “totter”.’155 Hoberman’s reading, which suggests Forster’s insinuation that stuffy Britain has leeched the ‘blood’ or true spirit of ancient Greece and replaced it with an empty sham-​Hellenism, opens up space for a more thorough consideration of the novel’s insistent antagonism between Hellenistic, Platonic love, and the more virile, bodily love associated with the Assyrian bulls. Taking into account earlier episodes and debates in the novel, the museum episode appears not merely as a climax in the plot, but as a dramatic representation of the novel’s investment in personal, often radical approaches to material culture and the ancient past. Several times in the novel, the narrator turns to the language of ruin to describe characters’ emotional experiences. After returning from a vacation to Cambridge early in the text, Clive Durham confesses his love to Maurice, and Maurice responds angrily and dismissively, reminding Clive that ‘it’s the worst crime in the calendar’.156 In the following days, Maurice begins to realise the nature of his affection for Clive. His regret and agony ‘worked inwards, till it touched the root whence body and soul both spring, the “I” that he had been trained to obscure’. Finally recognising his agony, which ‘might have been joy’, Maurice realises: ‘New worlds broke loose in him at this, and he saw from the vastness of the ruin what ecstasy he had lost, what a communion.’157 This image parallels Maurice’s emotional crisis with a ruined landscape, the crumbled ruins of his prior, normative conception of himself birth in their stead ‘new worlds’. Shortly after, Clive suffers greatly thinking of Maurice’s response, fearing that he might ‘corrupt’ other young men. The narrator states: ‘So deeply had Clive become one with the beloved that he began to loathe himself. His whole philosophy of life broke down, and the sense of sin was reborn in its ruins, and crawled along corridors.’158 Clive’s philosophy of life hitherto had been shaped primarily by Plato, particularly the Phaedrus, in which he saw ‘his malady described exquisitely, calmly, as a passion which we can direct, like any other, towards good or bad’.159 Faced with the scorn of a ‘healthy normal Englishman’, Clive’s philosophy falls to ruin.160 For both Maurice and Clive, the devastation of emotional crisis generates new identities. Clive’s confession of love destroys Maurice’s contented normality, and Maurice’s virile, bodily allure ruins Clive’s platonic Hellenism. Paralleling in reverse the men’s experience of emotional ruin, these textual moments near the beginning of their relationship foreshadow each man’s state at the end of the novel—​a ‘new world’ with Alec for Maurice, and a repressive old world for Clive, perpetually haunted by the vision of Maurice ‘beckoning to him, clothed in the sun’ at Cambridge.161 Forster’s deployment of archaeological discourse as a medium for expressing queer desire importantly depends on a disparaging attitude towards ancient Greece and Platonism. Many scholars have examined the sources for Forster’s

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own understanding of homosexuality, focusing primarily on Forster’s readings of John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter. Forster explained in his ‘Terminal Note’ to the text that a visit to Carpenter spurred the conception of the novel.162 Forster’s Clive follows instead the late-​Victorian Hellenic movement at Oxford, one in which Linda Dowling establishes, ‘such writers as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds would deduce from Plato’s own writings an apology for male love as something not only noble but infinitely more ennobling than an exploded Christianity and those sexual taboos and legal proscriptions inspired by its dogmas’.163 For Clive, Plato’s writing initially serves as a freeing discourse, a body of ideas which validates his own desire. But Maurice ‘had no use for Greece. His interest in the classics had been slight and obscene, and had vanished when he loved Clive.’164 Maurice finds no solace in Hellenism, and favours his erotic and emotional attraction to Clive in the present over any conception of ancient Platonic love. The narrator states: ‘The stories of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, of Phaedrus, of the Theban band were well enough for those whose hearts were empty, but no substitute for life. That Clive should occasionally prefer them puzzled him.’ Maurice enjoys Italy ‘well enough’, but refused even to visit Greece in his travels, calling it ‘A heap of old stones without any paint on’.165 This tension over the significance of the Hellenic past reaches a climax when Clive visits Greece after an illness. The young man whom the Symposium had revealed to himself, and who had ‘been coming to thank [Pallas Athene] for years because she had lifted him out of the mire’, surprisingly sees in Greece ‘only dying light and a dead hand’.166 Ironically, Greece bores Clive straight. He writes to Maurice, ‘Against my will I have become normal. I cannot help it.’167 Forster positions Clive’s ultimately disappointing Platonic ideal against Maurice’s preference for Italy. Forster admits in his ‘Terminal Note’ that by this point in his composition, ‘[Clive] has annoyed me’, and continues: ‘He believed in platonic restraint and induced Maurice to acquiesce, which does not seem to me at all unlikely […] Consequently the relationship lasts for three years—​precarious, idealistic and peculiarly English: what Italian boy would have put up with it?’168 Forster’s frustration with English stuffiness (associated with an ascetic platonic love) and his preference for a less hypocritical Italy, place him neatly beside Vernon Lee. And, granting Wilde’s intense admiration for Hellenism and platonic rhetoric, his appreciation for the Renaissance attitude towards antiquity and fascination with Egyptian mythography and sensuality embodied in the hybrid Greek/​Egyptian sphinx serve as precursors to Maurice’s encounter with the Assyrian bulls. In the museum scene, where Forster signals Maurice and Alec’s physical attraction and connection through their preference for the Assyrian bulls over the bloodless Greek statues, Forster offers the bulls as antidotes to a constricting Hellenism which, in its asceticism, seemingly

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accommodates national, imperial, heteronormative institutions represented by the British Museum. During his time in Alexandria, Forster arguably found what Maurice only briefly encounters with the Assyrian bulls in the British Museum. In Alexandria, Forster experienced what Robert Martin and George Piggford label his ‘first important sexual relationship’, with Mohammed el Adl, who evidently improved Forster’s opinion of Egypt, which he disliked at first. After el Adl died of tuberculosis in 1922, Forster remained deeply attached to him for the rest of his life.169 In an extended letter written to el Adl over the seven years following his death, Forster fondly recalls their private moments together. Forster writes: ‘You called out my name at Beebit el Hagar station after we had seen that ruined temple about two miles from it that no one else seems to have seen. It was dark and I hear an Egyptian shouting who had lost his friend: Margan, Margan—​you calling me and I felt we belonged to each other, you had made me an Egyptian.’170 Forster attaches this acutely romantic moment to an archaeological site (Behbeit el-​Hagar, in Lower Egypt), and more significantly, to the memory of seeing together a ruined temple ‘that no one else seems to have seen’. Corne suggests that ‘there is a strongly persuasive temptation to read the “ruined temple” as a psychic projection shared by Forster and el Adl, given the uncanny echoing between the structure and the unique terms of their relationship. Like the ruin, their homoerotic bond hovers beneath the radar of general awareness, something that only they can see.’171 The shared encounter with a temple that others apparently overlooked also replicates Maurice and Alec’s private experience in the museum, and represents a sort of rite, after which Forster feels he and el Adl belong to each other, and he now belongs to Egypt. In their apparently unique way of seeing material remains, Forster and his friend dissolve both heteronormative and national or colonial boundaries. In a rather flirtatious letter to Siegfried Sassoon in August 1918, Forster wrote: ‘Very often I’m happy, and for good reasons. Ancient Alexandria—​to mention one—​is proving a most amusing companion. I’m constructing by archaeological and other reading an immense ghost city […] Here Hypatia was slain and Cleopatra loved and died, please.’172 Though Forster’s writings exhibit feelings of detachment and disappointment with modern Alexandria, he turns in a process of ‘archaeological and other reading’ to undermine the modern and find inspiration and identification in the past, resulting in two works: Alexandria: A History and Guide (1922), and Pharos and Pharillon (A Novelist’s Sketchbook of Alexandria Through the Ages) (1923). While the first of these relates the history of Alexandria in the first half, and a detailed guide through the modern city in the second, the tone of the work is arguably one of subtle frustration—​a scholarly fastidiousness

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underpinned by a yearning to find in Alexandria remnants of its romantic past, which is regularly disappointed by modern structures and imperial intervention. In Pharos and Pharillon, however, Forster appears to take the factual history and maps of his previous work and to tunnel beneath them, into private historical moments and unexplored spaces. Pharos and Pharillon is divided in half: the first (Pharos, named after Alexandria’s famed ancient lighthouse) providing episodic anecdotes of Alexandria’s history, the second (Pharillon, the smaller lighthouse constructed in its ruins), addressing Forster’s travels through the modern city. The layering effect of this organisation, in which the modern city rests on top of the ancient city, allows Forster to move fluidly back and forth, and yet it is the past which inspires wonder. This section demonstrates how in Pharos and Pharillon, Forster excavates and reads the city’s past through a parallel exploration of his own life experience, uncovering sites and bodies of queer resonance and undetonated energy, and encouraging his readers to approach the city of Alexandria and his texts through similar queer reading practices. The text’s dedication is two Greek words, which translate as ‘Hermes Psychopompos’. Herz sees the mythical figure of Hermes, the god who guides the dead from Earth to the afterlife, as a stand-​in for Forster’s deceased lover Mohammed. She asserts: ‘Behind the historian’s reconstructions of the past, a figure beckons, at once mythical and real … that of Forster’s dead friend Mohammed el Adl, the entire text an offering to his memory, indeed the result of his memory.’173 She cites Forster’s letter to the deceased el Adl, in which he states, ‘I have written a story because of you and dedicated a book to you.’ Herz adds, ‘In [the dedication] the presence of Hermes-​Mohammed frames Forster’s descent into the past and reemergence into his own present. It is a spiritual voyage taken under the guidance of one who, by making half of that journey, enabled Forster to complete the return.’174 Without using these terms, Herz suggests that Forster undertakes in Pharos and Pharillon a queer archaeology. Importantly, Pharos was the site of Alexander the Great’s shrine for his deceased friend Hephaestion, as Forster cites early in the text. Scholars who read Alexander’s relationship with Hephaestion as erotic have emphasised the importance of Pharos for Forster. Martin claims that Alexandria, as ‘a city sacred to the love of Alexander for Hephaestion […] brings together the ideals of moral earnestness and physical beauty, finding a place for homosexual love among the moral codes of the West’.175 Wendy Moffat similarly reflects, To the boy who read classics at Cambridge, Alexandria had resonance as a mythological first point in an ancient, noble gay past. In the fourth century B.C., had not Alexander the Great left his friend and lover Hephaestion’s side to explore the improbably spine of rock between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mariut and give the place his own glorious name?176

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Forster grasped the queer significance of the site, confessing in a letter to his friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson ‘a vague scheme for a book or a play about Alexander’, which yet he knew he could not release, concluding: ‘Here we are again. Unpublishable.’177 Understood as a queer archaeological reading of Alexandria’s history dedicated to el Adl, Pharos and Pharillon represents a site of queer memorial constructed on top of and connected to Alexander’s shrine to his own deceased lover. The work, though, necessarily undertakes this queer archaeology in extremely subtle ways. The undetonated energy Forster finds in Alexandria’s past is only partially detonated in the text. Through the text’s rendering of the temporal layers of Alexandria, with the shrine of Hephaestion and the body of Alexander at the core, Forster asks his readers to complete their own ‘archaeological and other reading’ of the ‘immense ghost city’ he has created, encouraging us to detonate the energy of historical and personal details we encounter there. We might also approach the queer landscapes and sites of Alexandria in Pharos and Pharillon through recent work by Alex Murray. In Landscapes of Decadence (2017), Murray addresses how Decadent writers overturn traditional, often national, understandings of place in their appropriations of landscapes. Places were often assigned cultural value in traditional Victorian discourse—​e.g., Paris could ‘corrupt and contaminate’ while Oxford could ‘preserve and purify the values’ of its inhabitants. In the face of such value judgements, several Decadent writers, claims Murray, ‘represented these places and others so as to challenge any easy means of mapping morality onto place. It is then not so much about places themselves, but about the ways in which writers mined and undermined the geographically specific literary and cultural context of particular places as they wrote about them.’178 Though Forster is not always considered a Decadent writer, his (to borrow Murray’s terms) ‘min[ing] and undermin[ing]’ of Alexandria in Pharos and Pharillon works in similar ways to the literary landscapes in Murray’s study. Forster works to undermine the colonialist vision of Alexandria, burrowing into the strata of the city to what is for him, its heart—​the forgotten body of Alexander, and a romanticised ancient past that precedes and supersedes modern imperial and heteronormative histories. In its structure—​ short, episodic representations of chronological moments in Alexandria’s history—​Forster’s text is laid out like the strata of the ancient landscape it addresses. Beginning with the geography of the site, Forster’s introduction then describes the famed lighthouse of Alexandria, Pharos, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and a persistent presence in both this text and his guidebook, tragically lost to modernity. Each short section in the first half commences in medias res, thrusting the reader

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into sometimes private historical moments. Modernity, though, regularly intrudes into these moments. Addressing the site where Pharos once stood, now occupied only by the ruins of a fifteenth-​century fort and mosque, Forster laments: ‘Nothing else can be attributed to the past, its stones have vanished and its spirit also.’179 He continues in a way that suggests the rape of the ancient landscape by modern imperialism: ‘The dominant memory in the chaos is now British, for here are some large holes, made by Admiral Seymour when he bombarded the Fort in 1882 and laid the basis of our intercourse with Egypt.’180 Forster constantly reminds his readers of the violent occupation of Alexandria by Western intruders, but then encourages us to dig back into romanticised moments of the past. Like the layers of his text, Forster imagines the sands of the desert outside Alexandria as layered with personal experience. Narrating Alexander’s journey across the desert to the sacred Oasis of Siwa, he ponders: The distance, the solitude of the desert, touch travellers even to-​day, and sharpen the imaginations of men who have crossed in armoured cars, and whom no god awaits … Alexander rode, remembering how, two hundred years before him, the Persians had ridden to loot the temple, and how on them as they were eating in the desert a sandstorm had descended, burying diners and dinner in company. Herein lay the magic of Siwa.181

Persian corpses litter the sand beneath Alexander, and Alexander’s quest across the desert is embedded in those sands, now crossed by modern men and women. Alexander’s thoughts about what lies beneath the sand anticipate Forster’s experiences in modern Alexandria. Herz claims of the second half of Pharos and Pharillon: ‘[T]‌he modern city is only lightly sketched … Only the city as a palimpsest of maps, of streets whose names recall other names and whose present dull gentility can be dismissed by a willed vision of its “vanished glory” excites the imagination.’182 Thus, in the structure of his text, Forster parallels the archaeological landscape the work describes, encouraging readers to encounter the text like an archaeological site, and to excavate private moments of the distant past to rejuvenate the disappointing present. At the centre of these excavations is the alluring body of Alexander, whom Forster depicts as without a fixed cultural identity. Presenting Alexander’s initial love for Hellenic culture as a youthful naïveté, Forster notes, ‘At the Dardanelles his archæological zeal was such that he ran naked round the tomb of Achilles.’183 During his trip through the desert, Alexander is initiated into a vague, great, dangerous knowledge, after which, ‘Never again does he regard Greece as the centre of the world.’184 Apparently turning away from mere Hellenism into something greater, Alexander then endeavours to fight Persia ‘as a lover now’.185 Forster longingly thinks of him: ‘[T]‌o

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us, who cannot have the perilous honour of acquaintance, he grows more lovable now than before. He has caught, by the unintellectual way, a glimpse of something great, if dangerous.’186 Like Maurice and Alec’s more corporeal, unintellectual engagement with the Assyrian bulls, Alexander comes to knowledge of ‘something great, if dangerous’, during his quest across the palimpsestic desert. In the second half of the text, Forster’s guide leads him to the supposed spot of Alexander’s tomb, located where the Rue Rosette, known long ago as the Canopic Road, meets the Gate of the Moon. While the guide seems uninterested, ‘being in search of a female companion named Leucippe, whom he deems of more permanent interest’, Forster seems enthralled by the sight before him: ‘The passage gleams like a jewel among the amorous rubbish that surrounds it. The vanished glory leaps up again, not in architectural detail but as a city of the soul.’187 Forster views the modern landscape and buildings around this hidden site, as well perhaps as his guide’s heterosexual distraction, as ‘amorous rubbish’. He continues to address the tomb: ‘There … is the body of Alexander the Great. There he lies, lapped in gold and lain in a coffin of glass. When Clitophon made his visit he had already lain there for eight hundred years, and according to legend he lies there still, walled into a forgotten cellar.’188 The ancient, beloved body lies forgotten beneath a dismissive modernity. Those who are willing to dig might find it. The final section of Pharos and Pharillon before the conclusion includes excerpts of poems by Forster’s friend C.P. Cavafy. In the last poem, the speaker addresses a faded epitaph of ‘a young man who died in the month of Athyr, the ancient Egyptian November’.189 The poem is composed of eleven lines with ellipses in the middle of each line (and at the end of the eleventh), as the speaker struggles to piece together the timeworn inscription. Discerning the words ‘tears’, ‘sorrows’, and ‘for us his friends /​mourning’, the speaker ponders, ‘I think Lucius … was much beloved.’190 Like an archaeologist piecing together fragments, Cavafy constructs the story of a young man perished tragically young, who leaves behind loving friends. The fragmentary poem is a fitting conclusion to Forster’s exploration of Alexandria, beneath which (both the city and the text) both Alexander’s and el Adl’s bodies remain, remembered by the special friends who seek them. Claiming, ‘Such a writer can never be popular’, Forster seems to reflect on himself as an artist as he lauds Cavafy, the gaps in the poem’s inscription pointing to all that he cannot say in his own work.191 Forster argues that Cavafy ‘has the strength (and of course the limitations) of the recluse, who, though not afraid of the world, always stands at a slight angle to it’.192 This strange conclusion suggests that Forster’s examination of Alexandria’s past comes from a ‘slight angle’ and that much that is left unsaid must be searched for. The ‘immense ghost city’ Forster tells Sassoon he is constructing ‘by

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archaeological and other reading’ is beneath the superficial layers of both the city itself and the text of Pharos and Pharillon. Like the speaker of Cavafy’s poem, the reader must dig, ‘by archaeological and other reading’, to find the body of the beloved in the ghost city of Alexandria.

Conclusion In the works considered here, we find Lee, Wilde, Ricketts, and Forster turning to musty heaps, ancestral ruins, exotic ancient imagery, tombs, and palimpsestic cities, seizing upon the coded and always suggestive nature of archaeological remains to excavate the desires buried within the self. Ripping fragments, refuse, bodies, and monuments from a normalising matrix determined by sanctioned institutions and aesthetics, and finding in these artefacts an undetonated energy, these writers reconstruct strange stories from beneath (in the words of ‘Prince Alberic’s narrator) ‘dry historical fact’. Constituting a queer imaginary deeply indebted to archaeological language and iconography almost a century before the disciplinary advent of queer archaeological practice, these works likewise instruct the reader in queer reading practices—​collectively creating a queer archaeological epistemology at the turn of the twentieth century. In recontextualising and refashioning historical landscapes, monuments, and artefacts, the figures in this chapter reveal the continued and ever-​ changing meanings of such materials. The winged bull of the ancient Assyrians is not a static monument, but played a role in shaping mid-​Victorians’ historical and imperial self-​consciousness, as reflected in Rossetti’s ‘The Burden of Nineveh’, and offered a positive primitivism which queer writers like Forster and his fictional museum visitors could position against the dominant queer reading of the past structured around platonic Hellenism. Similarly, Wilde’s playful explorations of diverse ancient mythographies in The Sphinx, and his queer historiography of Shakespeare’s work in Mr. W.H., demonstrate how the subjective experience of material encounters and reading practices that come, in Forster’s words, ‘at a slight angle’, yielded a queer iconography at the fin de siècle. Meanwhile, Lee’s rummaging through the materials of the Italian Renaissance in ‘Amour Dure’ and a vague medieval past in ‘Prince Alberic’ uncovers neglected remains and deploys them in the service of non-​normative attachments, suggesting unconventional, even erotohistoriographical, methods of reading medieval tapestries and Renaissance portraits. Thus, such appropriations allow past remains (even if fictional) to continue to make meaning in the present in other ways, often outside or in spite of traditional historiographies and national or imperial institutions.

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Wilde’s and Lee’s appropriations of portraits in their works, along with the late-​Victorian biographising trend that developed around the Fayum mummy portraits, suggest that fin-​de-​siècle readers and writers envisioned the portrait genre as uniquely capable of registering an individual’s complex historical and personal experience. My next chapter takes up the innovative ways of reading and knowing the past introduced in this chapter, and reveals how aesthetic innovators including Lee, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf found archaeology-​inspired ways of reading portraits, crafting portraits out of prose, and generating a Decadent prose style shaped by the sensual experience of archaeological discovery. Tracing the queer reading practices and non-​normative temporalities explored in Chapter 1 in the formal elements of experimental fin-​de-​siècle prose, the following chapter shows how such archaeologically inspired practices transfigure the forms of Decadent texts.

Notes 1 Oscar Wilde, The Sphinx, in Isobel Murray (ed.), Oscar Wilde: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Subsequent line references for The Sphinx are from Murray’s edition. 2 Portions of this chapter presenting an early version of the argument (focused on Wilde and Lee only) appear in ‘Strata of the Soul: The Queer Archaeologies of Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde’, Victoriographies 7:3 (2017). 3 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, in James Strachey (ed., trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. III (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), p. 192. 4 Barbara Voss, ‘Sexuality Studies in Archaeology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 37 (2008), 318. 5 See Angie Blumberg, ‘Strata of the Soul: The Queer Archaeologies of Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde’, Victoriographies 7:3 (2017). 6 Thomas Dowson, ‘Why Queer Archaeology?: An Introduction’, World Archaeology 32:2 (2000), 165. 2. 3rd edn 7 John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets Vols. 1–​ (London, 1893), p. 362. 8 Stefano Evangelista, ‘Greek Textual Archaeology and Erotic Epigraphy in Simeon Solomon and Michael Field’, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens [en linge] 78 (2013), doi: 10.4000/​cve.909 9 Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 5. 10 Ibid., p. 6. 11 Voss, ‘Sexuality Studies’, p. 318. 12 Dobson, ‘Cross-​Dressing Scholars and Mummies in Drag’, pp. 34–​35. 13 Dominic Montserrat, ‘Unidentified Human Remains: Mummies and Erotics of Biography’, in Montserrat (ed.), Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 175–​176.

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14 Georg Ebers, The Hellenic Portraits from the Fayum at Present in the Collection of Herr Graf. With Some Remarks on Other Works of This Class at Berlin and Elsewhere, Newly Studied and Appreciated by Georg Ebers, trans. Theodor Graf (New York, 1893), p. 20. 15 Ibid., pp. 87, 90. 16 Montserrat, ‘Unidentified Human Remains’, p. 178. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., pp. 178–​179. 19 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. xvi. 20 Vernon Lee, Euphorion; Being Studies of the Antique and the Medieval in the Renaissance (London, 1885), p. 190. 21 Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 93. 22 Evangelista, British Aestheticism, p. 79. For a more thorough explanation of the relationship and intellectual arguments among Lee, Sellers, and Harrison, see Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison, and Stephen Dyson’s Eugénie Sellers Strong: Portrait of an Archaeologist (Duckworth, 2004). 23 Lee, Renaissance Fancies and Studies (New York, 1896), p. vii. 24 Vernon Lee, Preface to Hauntings: Fantastic Stories in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales by Vernon Lee (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), pp. 38–​39. 25 Ibid., p. 39. 26 Michael Shanks, David Platt, and William L. Rathje, ‘The Perfume of Garbage: Modernity and the Archaeological’, Modernism/​modernity 11:1 (2004), 64. 27 Vernon Lee, The Spirit of Rome: Leaves from a Diary (Bodley Head, 1906), pp. 139–​140. 28 Ibid., p. 140. 29 Shanks, Platt, and Rathje, ‘The Perfume of Garbage’, p. 63. 30 Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham, Introduction, Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, by Vernon Lee (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), p. 14. 31 Vernon Lee, ‘Amour Dure’, in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, by Vernon Lee (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), p. 69. 32 Ibid., p. 54. 33 Ardel Haefele-​Thomas, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), pp. 136, 121. 34 Ibid., p. 140. 35 Margaret Stetz, ‘The Snake Lady and the Bruised Bodley Head’, in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 113. 36 Vernon Lee, ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, by Vernon Lee (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), pp. 182–​183.

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37 In addition to Haefele-​Thomas and Stetz, Martha Vicinus has also read this story as queer. Vicinus sees ‘Prince Alberic’ as Lee’s construction of ‘the ideal lesbian romance’, and, citing Elaine Marks’s definition of the ‘Sapphic school romance’, reads the bond between the effeminate Alberic and the snake lady into that genre, in ‘The Adolescent Boy: Fin de Siècle Femme Fatale?’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 5:1 (1994), 97, 98; Haefele-​Thomas reads the ‘queer heterosexual (albeit inter-​species)’ romance of the story alongside two of Lee’s other Gothic tales written at the same time, calling the three works Lee’s ‘defence of herself as a decadent queer author as well as a defence of her larger queer community’ in Queer Others, pp. 137–​138. 38 Lee, ‘Amour Dure’, p. 44. 39 Ibid., p. 45. 40 Ibid., p. 57. 41 Lee, ‘Amour Dure’, p. 61. 42 Ibid., p. 51. 43 Ibid., p. 52. 44 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 70. Maxwell and Pulham draw out this comparison in an appendix to Hauntings, arguing that ‘Pater’s influential impressionistic description, which implies that the image of the Mona Lisa is an essential feminine archetype, a condensation of key feminine types from the past, came to epitomise the certain important characteristics of the nineteenth-​century femme fatale and, along with Swinburne’s description [of figures in the Uffizi Gallery, ‘Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence’] can be seen to inform Lee’s treatment of the femme fatale in Hauntings’ (Appendix C, p. 287). 45 Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, & the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. 157–​158. 46 Yvonne Ivory, The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850–​1930 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 2. 47 Ibid., p. 4. 48 Ibid., p. 165. 49 Lee, ‘Prince Alberic’, p. 186. 50 Lee, ‘Prince Alberic’, pp. 184–​185. 51 Ibid., pp. 185–​186. 52 Ibid., pp. 186, 188. 53 Ibid., p. 188. 54 Brian Glavey, The Wallflower Avant-​Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 3. 55 Ibid. 56 Lee, ‘Prince Alberic’, pp. 189–​190. 57 Ibid., p. 189. 58 Ibid., pp. 184, 188. 59 The story of Susanna and the Elders is featured in the apocryphal book, ‘The History of Susanna’. Two older men watch an honourable married woman named Susanna while she bathes. The lustful old men proposition her, and she refuses. They then falsely accuse her of adultery. While on trial, Daniel asks both

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men for their stories, and Susanna is exonerated based on the inconsistency of their tales. The tableau was a popular subject among Renaissance painters. 60 Lee, ‘Prince Alberic’, p. 195. 61 Ibid. 62 Maxwell and Pulham, Footnotes, p. 195. 63 Lee, ‘Prince Alberic’, p. 194. This trough at the Castle of Sparkling Waters closely resembles a repurposed coffin Lee encountered in Ravenna and describes in her 1894 essay ‘Ravenna and her Ghosts’. Delightedly addressing a ‘Roman sarcophagus, on which you can still trace the outlines of garlands, which stands turned into a cattle trough’, Lee claims that ‘one is very glad’ that the coffin was not reused to hold a corpse, like others in Ravenna’ (172–​173). Lee celebrates the transformation of the sarcophagus and its continued place in the lives of Ravenna’s inhabitants, suggesting an appreciation for approaches to the material past that are dynamic, rather than static. Due to the preponderance of coffins, Lee claims, ‘[T]‌heir occupants . . . have played considerable part in the gossip of Ravenna’ (171). Lee turns to the repurposed troughs of Ravenna and the folklore that circulates around them to craft the pivotal moment that takes place next. 64 Ibid., p. 195. 65 Vicinus, ‘The Adolescent Boy’, p. 109. 66 Ibid., pp. 109–​110. 67 Lee, Euphorion, p. 22. 68 Ibid., p. 21. 69 Michel Foucault, ‘A Preface to Transgression’, in Jeremy R. Carrette (ed.), Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 60. 70 Freeman, Time Binds, pp. 95–​96. 71 Lee, ‘Amour Dure’, p. 75. 72 Ibid., p. 67. 73 Ibid., pp. 67–​68. 74 Ibid., p. 67. 75 Ibid., p. 69. 76 Lee, ‘Prince Alberic’, p. 193. 77 Ibid., p. 194. 78 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 5, 43. 79 Lee, ‘Prince Alberic’, p. 192. 80 Ibid., p. 227. 81 Ibid., p. 228. 82 Oscar Wilde, ‘To Reginald Harding’ (late March 1877), in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, eds Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-​Davis, p. 43. 83 Letters, p. 44. 84 See Harford Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1962), pp. 34–​36; Norbert Kohl, Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel, trans. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 25–​26. 85 Letters, p. 85. 86 Ibid.

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87 Iain Ross, ‘Charmides and the Sphinx: Wilde’s Engagement with Keats’, Victorian Poetry, 46 (2008), 462. 88 Iain Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 101. 89 Ibid., pp. 101–​102. 90 Ross, ‘Charmides and the Sphinx’, p. 451. 91 Ross, Oscar Wilde, p. 102. 92 Ibid., p. 103. 93 Wilde, ‘The Truth of Masks’, in Intentions (Leipzig: Heinemann and Balistier, 1891), p. 190. 94 Charles Ricketts, ‘Age-​Long Egypt’, The Observer (16 August 1931), p. 4. 95 Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 155. 96 Ibid., p. 157. 97 Ibid., p. 118. 98 Ibid., pp. 157–​158. 99 Ibid., p. 9. 100 Interested readers can access a facsimile of the book, along with later editions and illustrations, on openstax CNX, thanks to Nicholas Frankel. https://​cnx. org/​conte​nts/​h8Whe​Br_​@2.1:TuaO_​Mx2@2/​The-​Sph​inx-​by-​Oscar-​Wilde-​ with-​deco​rati​ons-​by-​Char​les-​Ricke​tts-​1894 101 Ruth Robbins, ‘ “A Very Curious Construction”: Masculinity and the Poetry of A.E. Housman and Oscar Wilde’, in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (eds), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 146. 102 Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books, p. 167. 103 Ibid. 104 Robbins, ‘ “A Very Curious Construction” ’, p. 144. Robbins’ italics. 105 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 188. 106 Readers can see these illustrations at ‘Second Series of Sphinx Illustrations (1923)’, Nicholas Frankel, The Sphinx. OpenStax CNX. 11 Apr. 2010 http://​ cnx.org/​conte​nts/​87c5a​178–​1aff-​467c-​9231–​3a897​9b83​[email protected]. 107 Wilde was evidently thinking of the tombs from Lycian Turkey. Excavated throughout the nineteenth century, several of these structures were displayed in the British Museum’s Lycian Collection. For example, the Nereid Monument and the Tomb of Payava, excavated by Charles Fellows, both were displayed in the British Museum, and remain there today. Significantly, Wilde’s father also excavated at Xanthos in Lycia at the same time as Fellows (see Ross, ‘Charmides and the Sphinx’, p. 461). 108 Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books, p. 158. 109 Ibid., p. 212. 110 Qtd. in Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books, p. 158. 111 Ellen Crowell, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Tomb: Silence and the Aesthetics of Queer Memorial’, BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-​ Century History. Edited by Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. www.branc​hcol​lect​ive.org/​?ps_​a​rtic​les

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12 Wilde, ‘The Truth of Masks’, p. 191. 1 113 Wilde, ‘To Charles Ricketts’ (June 1893), Letters, p. 566. 114 Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H. (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921), pp. 17–​18. 115 Ibid., p. 34. 116 Ibid., p. 59. 117 Ibid., p. 114. 118 Ibid., p. 113. 119 Ibid., pp. 115–​116. 120 Ibid., p. 117. 121 Ibid., pp. 117–​118. 122 Ibid., p. 118. 123 Ibid., p. 111. 124 Ibid., p. 28. 125 Ibid., pp. 27–​28. 126 Ibid., p. 119. 127 Ibid., p. 121. 128 Ibid., p. 120. 129 Charles Ricketts, Recollections of Oscar Wilde (London: Nonesuch Press, 1932), p. 29. 130 Ibid., pp. 35–​36. 131 Wilde, ‘To Charles Ricketts’ (Autumn 1889), Letters, p. 412 (Wilde’s italics). 132 Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell, Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 286. 133 Wilde, ‘The Truth of Masks’, p. 190. 134 Judith Scherer Herz, The Short Narratives of E.M. Forster (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), p. 64. 135 Ibid. 136 Richard Dellamora, Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 83. 137 Jonah Corne, ‘Queer Fragments: Ruination and Sexuality in E.M. Forster’, College Literature 41.3 (2014), 28. 138 E.M. Forster, ‘For the Museum’s Sake’, Abinger Harvest (London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1936), p. 294. 139 Qtd. in Norman Page, E.M. Forster’s Posthumous Fiction (Wellington, NZ: University of Victoria Press, 1977), p. 69. 140 E.M. Forster, ‘Terminal Note’, in Maurice (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), p. 250. 141 Wolfenden Report. 1957. British Library Online. www.bl.uk/​learn​ing/​timel​ine/​ larg​e107​413.html 142 E.M. Forster, Maurice: A Novel (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), p. 217. 143 Barbara Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 120. 144 Forster, Maurice, p. 217. 145 Ibid., p. 220.

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46 Ibid., p. 222. 1 147 Ibid. 148 Black, On Exhibit, p. 123. 149 Forster, ‘For the Museum’s Sake’, p. 290. 150 Forster, ‘Terminal Note’, p. 255. 151 Forster, Maurice, p. 223. 152 Forster, ‘Terminal Note’, p. 250. 153 Forster, Maurice, p. 224. 154 Ibid., pp. 224–​225. 155 Ruth Hoberman, Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 120. 156 Forster, Maurice, p. 59. 157 Ibid., p. 60. 158 Ibid., p. 73. 159 Ibid., p. 70. 160 Ibid., p. 73. 161 Ibid., p. 246. 162 Forster, ‘Terminal Note’, p. 249. 163 Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. xiv–​xv. 164 Forster, Maurice, pp. 110–​111. 165 Ibid., p. 111. 166 Ibid., p. 116. 167 Ibid. 168 Forster, ‘Terminal Note’, p. 251. 169 Robert Martin and George Piggford, Introduction in Martin and Piggford (eds), Queer Forster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 13. Forster’s dislike is evident from several of his letters, one in particular to S.R. Masood on 29 December 1915, in which Forster writes: ‘I do not like Egypt much—​or rather, I do not see it, for Alexandria is cosmopolitan. But what I have seen seems vastly inferior to India.’ Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, vol. 2, edited by Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 233. 170 E.M. Forster, ‘Memoir: Mohammed el Adl’, Alexandria: A History and Guide and Pharos and Pharillon, edited by Miriam Allott (London: André Deutsch, 2004), p. 331. 171 Corne, ‘Queer Fragments’, p. 28. 172 Forster, ‘To Siegfried Sassoon’ (August 1918), Selected Letters, p. 293. 173 Herz, The Short Narratives of E.M. Forster, p. 66. 174 Ibid. 175 Robert K. Martin, ‘The Paterian Mode in Forster’s Fiction: The Longest Journey to Pharos and Pharillon’, in John Henry Stape (ed.), E.M. Forster: Critical Assessments, Vol. IV, Relations and Aspects; The Modern Critical Response, 1945–​90 (Sussex: Helm Information, 1998), p. 11. 176 Wendy Moffat, E.M. Forster: A New Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 125. 177 Forster, ‘To Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’ (5 April 1916). Qtd. in Moffat, E.M. Forster: A New Life, pp. 125–​126.

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178 Alex Murray, Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 9. 179 E.M. Forster, Pharos and Pharillon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), p. 27. 180 Ibid. 181 Ibid., pp. 29–​30. 182 Herz, The Short Narratives of E.M. Forster, p. 67. 183 Forster, Pharos and Pharillon, p. 28. 184 Ibid., p. 30. 185 Ibid., p. 31. 186 Ibid., pp. 31–​32. 187 Ibid., p. 108. 188 Ibid., pp. 108–​109. 189 Ibid., p. 116. 190 Ibid., pp. 116–​117. 191 Ibid., p. 117. 192 Ibid.

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2 Archaeology and Decadent prose

In a letter to George Grove, editor of Macmillan’s Magazine, dated 17 April 1878, pioneering aesthete Walter Pater described his new experimental story, ‘The Child in the House’: It is not, as you may perhaps fancy, the first part of a work of fiction, but is meant to be complete in itself; though the first of a series, as I hope, with some real kind of consequence in it […] I call the M.S. a portrait, and mean readers, as they might do on seeing a portrait, to begin speculating—​what came of him?1

‘The Child in the House’ did not appear in the eventual volume Imaginary Portraits, but was published on its own in Macmillan’s. The collection Imaginary Portraits, first published in May 1887, included four other portraits which had also appeared individually in Macmillan’s between 1885 and 1887: ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, ‘Sebastian van Storck’, and ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’. Beyond this collection, however, Pater experimented with the genre, according to Lene Østermark-​Johansen, ‘from 1878 until his death in 1894’.2 Other imaginary portraits by Pater include ‘Gaudioso, the Second’, which I examine below, as well as Gaston de Latour, Marius the Epicurean, ‘Apollo in Picardy’, ‘Emerald Uthwart’, and others. Elisa Bizzotto has asked us to see the imaginary portrait as ‘a sub-​ genre of late-​ Victorian short fiction which several writers adopted, though only Pater institutionalized’.3 In a 2002 essay, Bizzotto develops a broad definition of the genre based on Pater’s description. According to Bizzotto, the imaginary portrait genre is based on three key elements. First, an imaginary portrait is ‘primarily a fictional expression, though sui ­generis’—​i.e., unique, in a class of its own; ‘Secondly, as its very name suggests, the imaginary portrait was connected with Pater’s role as an art critic and certainly ensued from his interest in painting. It thus resulted from a combination of narrative writing and critical writing on figurative arts […] Hence it was the fruit of a generic interrelation.’4 Additionally, this new genre ‘originated in an interplay of the sister arts, literature and painting,

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and so reflected a characteristic late nineteenth-​century concern with artistic hybridization’.5 Indeed, in his review of Imaginary Portraits, Decadent writer Arthur Symons praises Pater’s work in terms of artistic hybridisation, melding the composition of prose with the strokes of a paintbrush: Not merely is each a portrait, in the looser sense of the term, of a single soul, but it is a portrait, in the literal sense, a picture painted with a brush. So microscopic a brush only a Meissonnier could wield. The touches which go to form the portrait are so fine that it is difficult to see quite how much they do and mean, until, the end being reached, the whole picture starts out before you.6

This chapter reveals how Pater’s highly stylised generic and artistic hybridisation, along with a few other literary portraits it helped to inspire, were shaped in great part not only by archaeological discourse broadly but also by an often neglected key archaeological tract from the seventeenth century. Building on my first chapter’s discussion of the Fayum mummy portraits and the late-​Victorian ‘biographising trend’ they helped to inspire, I show that aesthetic innovators at the fin de siècle found archaeology-​inspired ways of reading portraits, crafting portraits out of prose, and creating a Decadent prose style shaped by the sensual experience of archaeological discovery. Thus, this chapter takes the earlier focus on queer reading practices and non-​normative temporalities and shows how such archaeologically inspired practices transfigure the forms of Decadent texts. In the last two decades, scholars like Bizzotto, Dennis Denisoff, Yvonne Ivory, and Colleen Denney have explored the portrait across Victorian media, emphasising its generic fluidity and its shifting aesthetic and social purposes.7 In Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film 1850–​1950, Denisoff states that at the end of the nineteenth century, certain aesthetic writers recognised that ‘the brittleness of such a constricting genre [as portraiture]’, historically associated with lineage, tradition, and ‘established hierarchies’, ‘actually offered a useful site of volatility, especially at the intersection of artistic and political value systems’.8 These rich, memory-​laden visual artefacts are, like archaeological artefacts, both pieces of objective study and also highly suggestive, open to subjective experience. In fact, Ivory connects portraiture in the Victorian period to emergent concepts of queer style, arguing ‘that the simultaneous emergence of the notion of the homosexual and the late-​Victorian revival of interest in the Renaissance accounts for much in the history of the presumed connection between gayness and style’. Queer writers like ‘Louis Couperus, Michael Field, Thomas Mann, Vita Sackville-​West, and Oscar Wilde’, she writes, ‘created literary portraits of Renaissance individualists whose personalities—​whose dedication to a consummate, idiosyncratic style—​encompassed great sexual complexity.’9 Bizzotto explains that ‘as the final question in the letter—​“what came of

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him?”— ​suggests, the contiguity of the genre to portrait painting also implies the reader’s active and sympathetic involvement with the central personality described in the story. Such a process requires a co-​participation, or even an identification, of the reader and, implicitly, the author of the literary work with its subject in order to both communicate and grasp its essence.’10 Thus, this chapter, like the first, considers types of queer reading practices. Taking advantage of portraiture as what Denisoff calls ‘a useful site of volatility’, readers can learn and apply unconventional or experimental methods to see the subjects of these portraits. As Bizzotto’s description suggests, the active role of the reader in crafting the response to ‘what came of him?’ positions we readers, in my understanding, as pseudo-​archaeologists, piecing fragments and unfinished portraits into historical and aesthetic narratives. By uncovering archaeology as a key discourse through which late-​Victorian writers conceived of, fictionalised, and looked at portraits, this chapter both supplements this contemporary scholarship on Victorian portraiture, and uncovers another key discussion at the long turn of the century shaped significantly by archaeological discourse—​that of Decadent style. I begin below with Pater’s Imaginary Portraits (1885–​ 1887), and ‘Gaudioso, the Second’ (1890), before moving on to Lee’s ‘Oke of Okehurst’ (1890) and Louis Norbert (1914). Though Lee’s stories are not designated generically as portraits, their formally experimental examinations of fictional portraits reveal the ‘volatility’ which late-​Victorian writers saw in portraiture and which allows for distinct aesthetic meditations on genre itself. These writers turned to archaeology to re-​conceive a portrait as a richly multimedial, multitemporal artefact. Supplementing my readings of Pater and Lee with Pater’s Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (1889), and Lee’s ‘The Blame of Portraits’, and concluding with a brief examination of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), I argue that these writers create an archaeological epistemology of portraiture—​a way of composing and looking at portraits—​that is both inspired by archaeological excavation and also embedded in their prose styles.

Pater and archaeological prose As Alex Murray and Jason David Hall have explained in their introduction to Decadent Poetics (2013), ‘Since 2000, the historicised and politicised readings of decadence [prominent in the 1990s] have been reunited with attention to literary form.’11 However, most recent studies of decadent form are focused on poetry, rather than prose. In his 1889 essay ‘Style’, Pater discusses the problems with a limited understanding of the artistic possibilities of prose. In fact, Pater declares that prose, though perhaps ‘the less

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ambitious form of literature’, is ‘the special art of the modern world.’12 He explains: ‘[P]‌rose thus asserting itself as the special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day, will be, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest experience—​an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid.’13 For Pater, who famously claimed that ‘all art aspires to the condition of music’, the contention that prose especially operates as an ‘instrument’ with such powerful and moving stops, demands that we recognise his appreciation prose as vital to his aesthetic.14 Vital to my reading is the fact that Pater’s arguably most significant model for prose style is archaeological. Various scholars (including William Shuter, Linda Dowling, and Stefano Evangelista) have recognised Pater’s interest in archaeology, particularly that of the Hellenic past. Pater’s admiration for the work of eighteenth-​century antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann is well known. However, Pater was also deeply inspired by the prose of seventeenth-​century English polymath Thomas Browne, whose works he praises in Appreciations (1889). Pater lauds Browne’s 1658 archaeological tract, Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial—​ Browne’s meditation on a collection of Saxon burial urns discovered in Norfolk. In his writings on both Winckelmann and Browne, Pater suggests that their encounters with artefacts of the past transformed the style of their prose. In The Renaissance, Pater envisions Winckelmann’s encounters with unearthed artefacts in Dresden revealing the ‘unexpressed pulsation[s]‌’ previously hidden in the words of Greek poetry.15 Similarly, in his 1886 essay ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, Pater claims, ‘The desire to “record these risen ashes and not to let them be buried twice among us,” had set free, in his manner of conceiving things, something not wholly analysable, something that may be properly called genius, which shapes his use of common words to stronger and deeper senses, in a way unusual in prose writing.’16 The archaeological discovery apparently resuscitates these aesthetic critics; and Browne in turn breathes life into disparate elements, transforming ‘common words’ into something quite uncommon. Pater draws from these archaeologically infused prose experiments, both their aesthetic content and their style, in his own construction of a new literary genre. In Urn Burial, encounters with material artefacts prompt textual reflection, the aesthetics of which are dictated by the sensual, amoral, transtemporal nature of those encounters. In other words, the archaeological encounter produces not only a visual and tactile aesthetic, but also an aesthetic style. In his essay on Browne, Pater celebrates the physician’s insistence on finding almost-​spiritual beauty where others might see mere morbidity: To most persons of mind sensitive as his, his chosen studies would have seemed full of melancholy, turning always, as they did, upon death and decay. It is

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British literature and archaeology, 1880–1930 well, perhaps, that life should be something of a ‘meditation upon death’: but to many, certainly, Browne’s would have seemed too like a lifelong following of one’s own funeral. A museum is seldom a cheerful place—​oftenest induces the feeling that nothing could ever have been young; and to Browne the whole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of a somewhat mortified kind.17

Pater presents Browne as a perpetual investigator of a world rife with wonders. When morbidity and decay tinge these wonders, they add significantly to, rather than detract from, their aesthetic value. Pater’s engagement with the themes of morbidity, decay, and death, featured in Urn Burial, pervade his works, and are familiar thematic tropes of late-​Victorian Decadence. Deemed by a fellow Oxonian ‘the father of archaeological teaching at Oxford’ because of a series lectures on Greek art he delivered in 1878, Pater infuses his works with archaeological references.18 Observing how Browne’s archaeological tract inspires Pater’s aesthetic process—​in which art is energised through its proximity to death—​we uncover a strain of Decadent prose indebted to the archaeological encounter. The similarities between Browne’s and Pater’s work run deeply. ‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us’—​a line which might seem at home in Pater’s conclusion to The Renaissance—​comes actually from the equally memorable peroration of Urn Burial—​inviting the suspicion that Pater’s call to ‘burn always with this hard gem-​like flame’ might have been inspired by Browne all along.19 Similarly, Browne asserts in Urn Burial’s final chapter, ‘We live with death and die not in a moment’, and follows by asking ‘How many pulses made up the life of Methuselah…’20 These lines also anticipate Pater’s conclusion, where (paraphrasing Victor Hugo) he declares ‘we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve’, and famously concludes, ‘For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.’21 For Pater, living with death is essential to the artistic impression. Lamenting what he saw as a misrepresentation of Greek art and life in the display of the Parthenon sculptures in the cold, decontextualised space of the British museum, Pater claims in ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’ (1880) that the ideal of Greek art represented in the marbles arises ‘continuously and increasingly, upwards from its simplest products, the oil-​vessel or the urn’.22 Pater’s psychic and aesthetic investment in quotidian artefacts speaks to the wider Victorian admiration for the everyday items archaeology turned up, particularly at Pompeii, but also evokes Browne’s burial urns. Several scholars have traced Pater’s use of archaeological discourse in ways that are helpful to this study, though few investigate Pater’s debt to Browne. Linda Dowling explains that following the devastating response to the publication of The Renaissance in 1873, Pater turned to the new

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humanistic sciences of mythology, anthropology, and archaeology for new ways to ground his humanistic studies.23 She argues that in ‘Demeter and Persephone’ (first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1876 and reprinted in Greek Studies in 1895), an essay shaped in great part by the archaeological discoveries of Charles Newton at Cnidus, Pater first ‘turn[s]‌to etymology as an “archaeology” of language and to mythography as an “archaeology” of mind’, before ‘turn[ing] to archaeology itself as the science that will open the actual earth and array it for the imagination’.24 Dowling’s essay provides helpful groundwork for tracing the explicit and subtler archaeological excavations throughout Pater’s oeuvre. Additionally, in Rereading Walter Pater (1997), William Shuter traces the motif of the grave visit throughout Pater’s works, reading ‘the unearthing of buried relics’ as ‘a variation of the motif of the grave visit’.25 Shuter cites the influence of various archaeologists on Pater, including Winckelmann, as well as practitioners of a more vaguely defined archaeology such as Mérimée, Raphael, and the second-​century traveller and writer Pausanias.26 Winckelmann’s influence on Pater cannot be denied, considering the late-​Victorian association of Winckelmann with Hellenism and queer desire, and Pater’s 1867 essay ‘Winckelmann’, included in The Renaissance (1873). In ‘Sculpture, Style, and Pater’s Imaginative Sense of Touch’, Østermark-​Johansen reclaims Pater’s fascination with the tactile, using his essay on Winckelmann as reference. She establishes Pater’s fascination with Winckelmann as both an aesthetic innovator and what I would call a queer archaeologist, claiming: [Pater’s] Winckelmann unites the activities of the scholar, the writer, the critic, the antiquarian and the archaeologist; his exercise of sight and touch provides the unity between the physical and the metaphysical worlds, between the past and the present. Physical touch brings Winckelmann into metaphysical contact with both the spirit of antiquity and with Goethe; the antiquarian’s handling of Greek statues puts him in touch with both his own homoeroticism and that of Greek culture; Winckelmann the archaeologist penetrates the soil and takes possession of the relics of the past embedded under the surface.27

Østermark-​Johansen’s vision of Winckelmann as one who penetrates the soil reveals another reason he appeals to Pater, who, as Dowling and Shuter have demonstrated, found aesthetic inspiration in burial and unearthing. Describing Winckelmann’s visits to collections of antiquities in Dresden, Pater imagines the collections transforming his engagement with ‘the words of Greek poetry’.28 Though ‘stirred indeed and roused by’ the poetry, Pater imagines Winckelmann ‘yet divining beyond the words some unexpressed pulsation of sensuous life’: ‘Suddenly he is in contact with that life, still fervent in the relics of plastic art … [W]‌e can hardly imagine how deeply the human mind was moved, when, at the Renaissance, in the midst of a frozen world, the buried fire of ancient art rose up from under the

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soil.’29 Using an archaeological analogy of exhumation, Pater envisions Winckelmann’s encounter with ancient art and relics revealing what was previously hidden in the mere words of Greek poetry. The motif of art and the ‘sensuous life’ rising from beneath the soil appear throughout The Renaissance, as well as in Greek Studies, Marius the Epicurean, and several of Pater’s Imaginary Portraits. Martine Lambert-​Charbonnier asserts, ‘In the Imaginary Portraits, the recreation of culture is often inspired by the contemplation of art.’ Focusing on ‘Emerald Uthwart’, ‘Gaudioso, the Second’ and ‘Sebastian van Storck’, she demonstrates that ekphrasis is a key ‘strategy in his fiction where the revival of culture through the resurgence of the past is a dominant theme’.30 Focusing on Pater’s discussion of Homer’s ekphraseis, which Pater claims contain ‘a sort of internal evidence […] of a certain degree of reality, signs in them of an imagination stirred by surprise at the spectacle of real works of art’—​Lambert-​Charbonnier concludes: ‘So Homer’s descriptions can be considered as archaeological documents in a way.’31 Our compulsion to read Pater’s recovery of historical artwork and texts as archaeological comes honestly. In other words, these are both responsible scholarly compulsions (well-​supported) and personal (impelled perhaps by our own ‘imagination[s] stirred by’ art). My readings below take up the impulse across Pater scholarship to read his works via archaeology, and reveal such impulses to connote a deeper reality: the central role of archaeology in the cultural revivals and creation of experimental Decadent prose at the turn of the twentieth century. Pater claims that in Winckelmann’s works, the ‘wistful sense of something lost to be regained’ is more evident than ‘the desire of discovering anything new’.32 Like Winckelmann, Pater himself apparently sought to regain materials from the past for his cultural production, and believed in fact that there is nothing new, only new combinations. As he writes of Plato in Plato and Platonism (1893): [I]‌n spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before … Nothing but the life-​giving principle of cohesion is new; the new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the form is new.33

Like most of the writers considered in this book, Pater imagines the materials of the past as being constantly reconstituted in the process of creating new forms. In claiming that the ‘seemingly new is old also’, Pater echoes the writers explored in my first chapter who find potential energy embedded in past things and ideas. This potential energy is realised through a ‘life-​giving principle’, breathed into old thoughts and materials by the writer.

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Like archaeology, Decadent writing, according to many critics and practitioners, relies on fragments. For example, Paul Bourget asserts in an 1881 essay on Baudelaire: ‘A decadent style is one in which the unity of the book falls apart, replaced by the independence of the page, where the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the word.’34 Similarly, in Affirmations (1898), Havelock Ellis defines decadent style in opposition to classical style. Whereas classical style ‘is ­beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole’, decadent style ‘is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts’. Ellis continues, ‘Among our early prose-​writers Sir Thomas Browne represents the type of decadence in style. Swift’s prose is classic, Pater’s decadent.’ Tracing the heterogeneity of language through Browne and Pater, Ellis goes on to demonstrate his theory in relation to architecture, revealing that the part/​whole model of decadence applies not just to language, but to material culture as well.35 In his own works, Pater repeatedly turns to actual fragments (like the ‘actual threads’ he references in Plato and Platonism) in need of ‘the life-​ giving principle of cohesion’. His aesthetic process as such can be read as archaeological. For example, in ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, he refers to Newton’s excavations at Cnidus, claiming that ‘what we actually possess is some actual fragments of poetry, some actual fragments of sculpture; and with a curiosity, justified by the direct aesthetic beauty of these fragments, we feel our way backwards to that engaging picture of the poet-​ people, with which the ingenuity of modern theory has filled the void in our knowledge’.36 The aesthetic critic—​and perhaps especially the queer aesthetic critic—​like the archaeologist, apprehends only fragments, with which he feels his way backwards, material and literary pieces facilitating a tactile connection to ancient people and their art. More than the uncovering of beautiful remains, Pater was also drawn to the unseemly substances unearthed either accidentally or through excavation. The protagonist of ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (Imaginary Portraits, 1887) reflects that the ‘whole world almost seem[s]‌buried … made and re-​made of the dead’.37 Dowling states that this same sensibility ‘weighs oppressively on [Pater] and imbues his writing with its peculiar savor of antiquarian mold or decay’.38 Indeed, Pater was described by John Addington Symonds as having ‘a kind of Death clinging to the man…wh[ich] makes his music (but heavens! how sweet it is!) a little faint and sickly’.39 Dowling claims that Pater’s understanding of Culture was shaped by various German sources in ways that explain his interest in art unearthed. ‘[T]he German word for both culture and agriculture—​Kultur—​was spelled, as it often was in the nineteenth century before German orthography became fixed, with a “C”: Cultur.’; ‘Matthew Arnold’s “Culture” ’, explains Dowling, ‘thus begins for Pater as culture, the turning over of the earth.’40 Similarly, Shuter

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explores in his reading of Pater’s ‘On Wordsworth’ and Marius ‘the intimate link between humanity and the “lime and clay” of the earth’, and argues, ‘[W]e may conclude that [Pater] recognized still another etymological connection, that between “human” and “humation.” As conceived by the Indo-​ European family of languages, man is, quite literally, an “earthling”.’41 Wolfgang Iser claims, ‘Art preserves what time destroys, and this preservation is Pater’s definition of culture.’42 These three designations of Pater’s ‘culture’ together invite us to read Pater’s idea of culture production as a process not just of creation but of recovery—​of unearthing art which has been buried and reconstituting it into new forms. Pater’s fascination with cremation and inhumation in Browne’s Urn Burial, and the trope of artefacts unearthed, is thus neither isolated nor insignificant, but rather serves as a central piece of Pater’s wider aesthetic.

Imaginary Portraits The cultural and aesthetic revivals presented in Pater’s Imaginary Portraits are inspired by such unearthings. These stories are generally understood as narrating the return of a pagan god to a distant future and place—​Dionysus in Denys and Apollo in Carl—​inspired by Heinrich Heine’s 1854 essay ‘The Gods in Exile’. In ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ and ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’, a narrator stumbles upon, or is inspired to investigate, the subject of the portrait through an archaeological encounter. Such frames are ‘a major characteristic of the Imaginary Portraits, both as narrative and as visual structures’, according to Østermark-​Johansen, and I have chosen ‘Denys’ and ‘Duke Carl’ because of the particular archaeological nature of their frames.43 The narrator of ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ comes across a fragment of stained glass in a French bric-​a-​brac shop, which leads him to a collection of tapestries in ‘a little Gothic building’, then to notes in a ‘priest’s curious library’, and finally, the narrator claims, ‘the story shaped itself’.44 The tapestries reveal the image of Denys: ‘a suffering, tortured figure. With all the beauty of a pagan god, he has suffered after a manner of which we must suppose pagan gods incapable.’45 Similarly, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’—​the title itself gesturing to a strange collusion of beauty and decay—​begins with a frame narrative describing the exposure of two corpses. One of these bodies is the deceased eighteenth-​century Duke Carl. Within each of these frame narratives, the portraits feature numerous encounters with unearthed artefacts and bodies which ultimately spur a cultural revival. Scholars including Stefano Evangelista, Linda Dowling, Martine Lambert-​ Charbonnier, William Shuter, and Østermark-​Johansen have explored these tales, uncovering the particular erotic, aesthetic, and religious concepts underlying these resurrected gods. Considering that Pater’s essay was first published in the

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same year as ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ (1886) and one year before ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887), these burial tropes, and the stylistic and aesthetic moves driven by the stories’ unearthings, can be productively read alongside the archaeological tract Pater revered. Reading the stories via the style and aesthetic of Browne’s Urn Burial, and focusing on the repeated trope of burial and unearthing, we see how Pater draws from archaeological discourse to create an archaeological aesthetic, and, in his unique hybrid of visuality and language, crafts a prose artefact and a deeply influential literary genre. Within the frame, the history of Denys itself, set in medieval France, begins with the accidental discovery of ‘a finely-​sculptured Greek coffin of stone’, and within it, ‘among the ashes of the dead—​a flask of lively green glass, like a great emerald’.46 The narrator explains that drinking from the flask prompts a return of a golden age, including excellent grape harvests, and a celebration of youth, music, and art, all seemingly led by the new fruit-​seller, Denys. Though for a time, claims the narrator, ‘It seemed there would be winter no more’, a decadent decline appears imminent.47 Pater’s Denys, once gentle, eventually ‘los[es] something of his gentleness’, and ‘a darkness [grows] upon him’.48 When he appears to have brought misery and madness on his community, the Clergy of Auxerre choose to remedy the problem by exhuming one of the patron saints, buried ‘somewhere under the flagstones of the sanctuary’.49 The pavement of the choir is excavated, and witnesses observe the grave before them ‘as if it had been a battlefield of mouldering human remains’.50 After seeing the ‘dwindled’ and ‘shrunken’ body unearthed, Denys experiences a fit, ‘as though a demon were going out of him’.51 Dowling argues that the repetition in Pater’s works of buried relics, opened graves, and beautiful corpses are ‘the metaphors of material transfiguration’.52 In ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, the unearthing of relics along with this distinctly not beautiful corpse bring about an actual transfiguration which spurs an aesthetic revival. Following the exhumation, Denys turns ‘with an odd revulsion of feeling, to gloomy objects’; he picks out a bone from the exhumed body to wear around his neck, and eventually makes his way to an artistic workshop in a monastery.53 Denys’s mere presence in the workshop inspires the workers around him, and ‘[u]‌nconsciously’ he informs a new ‘manner’ of artwork.54 This new manner is expressed first through a ‘wilde gaiety, exuberant in a wreathing of life-​like imageries’, which eventually transfers into ‘obscure regions of the satiric, the grotesque and coarse’; ultimately what results is a sort of ‘seriousness […] in the precise sort of expression that should be induced upon [the material]. It was as if the gay old pagan world had been blessed in some way.’55 Denys’s turn to ‘gloomy objects’ seems necessary for, or at least connected to, his ability to inspire new art, especially with sudden ‘seriousness’.

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Pater’s emphasis on Dionysus as a god of aesthetic inspiration is productively read through Dionysus’s connection to death, burial, exhumation, and rebirth—​in the nineteenth century, notably archaeological tropes. Through the archaeological discoveries that drive the frame narrative, along with Denys’s preoccupation with death, Pater’s Denys fictionalises his notion of cultural revival prompted by archaeological discovery, and crafts an aesthetic of beautiful decay in his portrait. ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ is often read alongside Pater’s ‘A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew’ (1876), in which Pater explores the ‘double-​birth’ of Dionysus, and his consequential dual nature: ‘[H]‌e is born once and again; his birth, first of fire, and afterwards of dew; the two dangers that beset him; his victory over two enemies, the capricious, excessive heats and colds of spring.’56 Pater’s interest in Dionysus’s birth ‘of fire’ gestures to his Conclusion to The Renaissance, his reference to ‘impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them’, and his call ‘[t]o burn always with this hard gem-​like flame’.57 But this emphasis on fire also evokes Urn Burial, in which Browne waxes lengthily on the process of cremation and the effects of fire on the body. Pater’s recasting of the god birthed of fire suggests his efforts to renew and modify prominent nineteenth-​century modes of Hellenism. Evangelista explores Denys’s darker side in ‘A Revolting Mistake: Walter Pater’s Iconography of Dionysus’. Opening his essay with Shelley’s ‘revolt[ed]’ response to Michelangelo’s statue of Bacchus in Florence, Evangelista explains nineteenth-​ century European Hellenism’s enormous debt to the Apollonian classicism of Winckelmann.58 Evangelista maintains that it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that Winckelmann’s classicism was challenged, particularly by Pater in ‘A Study of Dionysus’, ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’, and ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’. Here, he claims, Pater ‘systematically tried to create a place within classicism for what was traditionally perceived as anti-​classical or romantic, for the troubled and inharmonious, irrational and fleshy side of the Greek imagination, the thought of which had shocked Shelley in Florence’.59 Evangelista’s examination of Pater’s interest in the two personae of Dionysus—​Zagreus, the version of Dionysus most connected with death and immortality, and Eleutherios, the god of liberation and deliverance through aesthetic pleasure—​suggests ways of reading ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ as advocating for an archaeologically inspired aesthetic from which the deathly and moribund are not excluded, but essential. While Evangelista establishes Pater’s defection from Winckelmann’s ‘Apollonian ideal’, he does not mention Browne as an alternative archaeological inspiration. By reading ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ and ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ via Brownian prose, we uncover Pater’s indebtedness to this earlier archaeologist for a beautifully mortified aesthetic; and his proposal for an alternate mode of cultural production.

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In the end, Denys is literally torn apart. Taking the lead role in a pageant featuring the hunt of Winter through the streets, the body of Denys ‘was tossed hither and thither, torn at last limb from limb. The men stuck little shreds of his flesh, or, failing that, of his torn raiment, into their caps; the women lending their long hairpins for the purpose.’60 Only his heart remains, which is buried by the monk Hermes. Pater returns us to the beginning of his tale, where the narrator pieces together fragmentary images and artefacts to compose the story of Denys in a process of archaeological reconstruction. Pater’s Dionysian myth depends on the same cyclical rebirth for which Dionysus is known. The items of the past are unearthed, fused together, and then fragmented or buried again. We can read this text’s foregrounding of fragmentation and recombination in relation to Pater’s ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ essay. Here, Pater cites a letter from a student to Browne, in which the student requests the ‘re-​individualling of an incinerated plant’.61 Pater continues: ‘Palingenesis, resurrection, effected by orderly prescription—​ the “re-​individualling” of an “incinerated ­organism”—​is a subject which affords us a natural transition to the little book of the Hydriotaphia, or Treatise of Urn-​Burial.’62 Pater’s evocation of incineration, fragmentation, recombination, as formal strategies in Browne invite us to recognise this same archaeological process in his Imaginary Portraits as extending from Browne’s Urn Burial. Pater’s ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ is somewhat more difficult to read, despite the fact that Pater was rather upfront in the text’s postscript about what Carl was meant to ‘embody’—​the ‘Enlightening, the Aufklärung’ which ‘was effected by other hands; Lessing and Herder, brilliant precursors of the age of genius which centred in Goethe’.63 Duke Carl’s story commences with ‘a delightful rummaging of one of those old lumber-​rooms’, in which Carl discovers a book, and inside the book, a poem (Conrad Celtis’s ‘Ode to Apollo’), which inspires his aesthetic impulse. Thus, like the story of Denys, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ envisions an aesthetic awakening through multiple layers of archaeological encounter, inviting an archaeological reading process of its characteristically dense, florid prose. The titular Carl sees himself in the role of the hyperborean Apollo, returned in eighteenth-​century Germany, ‘prompting art, music, poetry, and the philosophy which interprets man’s life’.64 In the end, though, Carl fails in his endeavour. Just as Pater celebrates the Dionysian over the Apollonian (according to Evangelista) ‘as a self-​sufficient aesthetic within the artistic tradition of ancient Greece and beyond’, his Denys is more capable of carrying out aesthetic regeneration than his Carl.65 Unlike Denys, Carl’s attitude towards death and morbidity is conflicted. Though ‘the suggestion of it was everywhere’, and the ‘death-​knell […]

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seemed to come out of the ugly grave itself, and enjoyment was dead’, Carl is haunted rather than inspired.66 The narrator states: Certainly, amid the living world in Germany, especially in old, sleepy Rosenmold, death made great parade of itself. Youth even, in its sentimental mood, was ready to indulge in the luxury of decay, and amuse itself with fancies of the tomb; as in periods of decadence or suspended progress, when the world seems to nap for a time, artifices for the arrest or disguise of old age are adopted as a fashion, and become the fopperies of the young.67

In this passage, the narrator seems ultimately disdainful of a morbid decadent aesthetic, spurning the ‘luxury of decay’ as superficial foppery. Carl is contrasted with the overwhelming presence of death, a paragon of youth amidst decay. While Denys becomes intimately preoccupied with the physical attributes of death, Carl cannot appreciate the macabre reminders of mortality or recognise the relationship between death and his aesthetic vision. Reflecting on the commemoration of All Souls’ Day, which he ‘revolted from’, Carl encounters ‘a rude coffin’ in a churchyard, and flees. Reflecting on the horrors of death, Carl transfers his thoughts to ‘the rebounding power of youth, with renewed appetite, to life and sense’.68 He decides to try an experiment, namely, the faking of his own death. In Pater’s Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater (1967), Gerald Monsman reads Carl as a Teutonic Apollo, Balder, ‘the god whose life follows that of Dionysus in his death and resurrection’, ‘the young god of light who dwells in the golden city of Asgard among the other gods and heroes of the Teutonic pantheon’.69 According to myth Balder is imprisoned in hell until ‘the coming of the new Golden Age’.70 Monsman explains that Carl, after playing Balder in a musical drama in Rosenmold, ‘turns his whole life into an actual re-​enactment of the Apollo-​Balder myth’. He stages his own funeral, complete with an empty sarcophagus, in an experiment which ‘enables Duke Carl to escape the death-​like atmosphere of the Rosenmold court’.71 While Denys undergoes a transformative experience through encounter with an exhumation, Carl’s fake death, embraced as an escape from death’s ‘gloomy trappings’, frees him for an (unfortunately untenable) aesthetic renewal. Upon returning to Rosenmold after an invigorating escape to the countryside, Carl’s aesthetic mission is cut short. He falls in love with a young beggar woman, and on the night of their planned marriage, they are trampled by an invading army.72 The story’s end takes us back to its beginning, to the discovery of two unknown corpses, verified by ‘German bone-​science’ to be male and female.73 Carl becomes, according to Monsman, ‘the seed-​ bed out of which the German Renaissance arises’.74 The cyclicality of Pater’s narrative reinforces the understanding that buried corpses are not just the ends of personal histories or stories, they are also beginnings. Staged for

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encounter, they contain the potential energy of aesthetic revival and cultural production. This trope invites an archaeological reading process that is central to Pater’s vision of cultural revivals, and which is explored in various innovative ways in the literary portraits that follow. Pater’s later portrait, ‘Gaudioso, the Second’, begun around 1890 and never finished before his death in 1894, features the most archaeologist-​ like subject of all of his portraits, materialising the more implicit Brownian suggestions from his earlier portraits. Unlike ‘Denys’ and ‘Duke Carl’, the subject of ‘Gaudioso’ was inspired by a painting by Italian Renaissance artist Girolamo Romanino in London’s National Gallery, dated to 1524. Pater’s text thus appropriates the more historical meaning of ‘imaginary portrait’—​a depiction of a historical person whose appearance is unknown, using a real model.75 Pater’s portrait describes the personality of Domenico Averoldi, the imagined sitter for the portrait of Gaudioso the First, and the inheritor of his position as Gaudioso the Second, Bishop of Brescia. Pater had visited Brescia, along with Milan and Bergamo in his trip to Northern Italy in 1889.76 In Pater’s portrait, Domenico Averoldi’s personal and theological ethos revolves around ‘the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body’: ‘it became to Domenico the essence, the revealing doctrine of Revelation itself: the very soul of Inspiration’.77 By accepting and celebrating the resurrection of the body instead of condemning the carnal, Averoldi finds joy and enlightenment in matter and becomes a patron of art. ‘With that sweet thought of the carnal resurrection ever in his mind, he might frankly accept the world of sight; it would be almost a piety to “immerse” oneself in the matter [our Lord] himself had redeemed—​this lovely realm of perfected colour and form.’78 In his recovery work on this story, Monsman presents the unfinished portrait, along with Gaston de Latour (another portrait begun along with ‘Gaudioso’ and also not completed) as a response via Socratic dialogue to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Citing Pater’s frustration with Wilde’s novel, Monsman claims that in Gaston and ‘Gaudioso’, ‘the Victorian dichotomy of spirit and flesh, soul and body, is shown as Platonically harmonized—​they are intertwined rather than dichotomized’.79 Building on Monsman’s recovery work, I argue that Averoldi is modelled in part on Thomas Browne, Pater’s archaeologist and patron of prose, and his philosophy of the blessedness of matter deeply inspired by archaeological discourse. Averoldi’s enlightenment and new philosophy materialise from his experiences in the crypts of Brescia. Pater’s narrator explains that when Averoldi joins the church, a bishop who maintains doubts about Averoldi’s readiness sentences him to work within the Venerable Congregation of Relics. This task is ‘apparently for the mortification of surviving carnal or worldly tastes’.80 His task as a member of the congregation is to descend into

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the crypts, identify the bones of ancient martyrs, separate them from the remains of pagans buried in the same catacombs, confirm their validity, and rebury them appropriately.81 ‘It was like a penance’, claims the narrator, ‘thinly disguised,—​his enforced sojourn in dark subterranean regions, so distastefully in contrast to the gaiety of the world above’.82 Given Pater’s fascination with Browne’s morbid affinities, and the fact that he began working on ‘Gaudioso’ just one year after ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ appeared in Appreciations, we might productively read his Averoldi through his Browne. For example, despite the supposed distastefulness of such delvings, Averoldi finds instead of horror, spiritual and aesthetic enlightenment: ‘What the old Italian artists and others for the most part had conceived as a motive of physical horror, the [open grave], was to him eminently gracious and pleasant, sanctifying every kind of physical beauty.’83 This passage seems to echo the passage from ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ mentioned above: To most persons of mind sensitive as his, his chosen studies would have seemed full of melancholy, turning always, as they did, upon death and decay. It is well, perhaps, that life should be something of a ‘meditation upon death’: but to many, certainly, Browne’s would have seemed too like a lifelong following of one’s own funeral. […] to Browne the whole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of a somewhat mortified kind.84

Their examinations of morbid materials inspire Pater’s Browne and Averoldi; their subterranean exploits ultimately ‘sanctify’ the beauty of the material world. Indeed, Pater’s Averoldi also speculates on the ashes that are so central to Urn Burial. Averoldi recalls the Biblical Job’s cry—​‘In my flesh I shall see my God’—​which is ‘suggested to him by the very ashes, these repulsive ashes of humanity’, and which ‘re-​fortified, more stoutly than ever, his old just pride in the material world’.85 Similarly, Browne’s unearthing of the burial urns, in Pater’s understanding, awakened new aesthetic senses and invigorated his formal capabilities. Pater claims that for Browne, ‘The desire to “record these risen ashes and not to let them be buried twice among us,” had set free, in his manner of conceiving things, something not wholly analysable, something that may be properly called genius, which shapes his use of common words to stronger and deeper senses, in a way unusual in prose writing.’86 For Pater, the archaeological encounter inflamed Browne’s genius and actually shaped the substance of his writing, impelling experimental prose. Similarly, his Averoldi discovers in the mouldy crypts of Brescia a refortified doctrine of bodily resurrection and a new appreciation for the material world: ‘Domenico was become, might one say, a spiritual, a religious, materialist; and by consequence a warmer lover than ever, as wealthy also an effective patron, of the living art of his day.’87 In Pater’s vision, these distasteful studies of death produce aesthetic renewal.

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Unlike ‘Denys’ and ‘Duke Carl’, ‘Gaudioso’ does not feature a frame narrative in which a traveller or editor introduces the reader to the artefact that is the story. Instead, the narrator of ‘Gaudioso’ brings readers into the crypt with the subject. Meditating on the ‘subterranean regions’ to which Averoldi descends, the narrator evokes layers of stratification, tracing Averoldi’s underworld journey through Christian history itself. Pater’s narrator declares to readers, Behold him then, submissively at work, day by day, in mouldering ossuaries, charnel-​houses, and such places, in those many dark crypts of the old Brescian churches, crypt below crypt, where the ‘Saints’ Tragedy’ of the first Christian centuries played out, and where, amid the buried or misused relics of voluptuous pagan Brixia (dear to Catullus), the precious bodies of the Martyrs still lay, sleeping!88

But beneath the Christian past is ‘the lowest layer of all’—​the pagan city of Brixia. ‘In the grimy purgatorio’, Pater writes, ‘you might come, in truth, sometimes upon some polished temple-​corner of the wicked buried city.’89 Using apostrophe to readers in ‘Behold him’, and the second person (‘you might come…’), Pater asks readers to imagine ourselves beside Averoldi, involving us in Averoldi’s excavations through the crypt and through time itself. The narrator’s vision continues: ‘Pledges, they seemed, in any case,—​ those dainty fragments,—​the promise, of a whole world of, at least visible, grace, which more laborious scholars than himself might recover.’90 To Averoldi, and perhaps to us imaginatively beside him, the fragments of the pagan past are a kind of ‘pledges’ or ‘promise’ of ‘a whole world of’ grace of the visible variety, if not also of the spiritual sort. Averoldi’s imaginative optimism soars at the possibilities contained within the fragments of the past, which are yet not for him to explore. The ‘more laborious scholars’ point to the archaeologists who will excavate the city in Averoldi’s future. The narrator distinguishes how, while those future archaeologists might ‘recover’ the buried artefacts, Averoldi must ‘re-​cover them in another sense, bury them once more’.91 Averoldi must recover what has been buried, study it, then re-​cover it, for future archaeologists to recover. The layers of encounter in Pater’s text are temporally convoluted. While the genre of portraiture traditionally portrays lineage, Pater’s literary portrait features the sitter (posing for a more historical subject), sifting through the material past with the modern reader by his side. The narrator invokes a particular trope of archaeological discourse quite apt for Averoldi’s story—​that of resurrection. As he uncovers ‘the precious bodies’ of the ‘sleeping’ martyrs, the narrator asks: ‘Did they think it was the resurrection morn, come at last, after so long a night, thus exposed again to the old earthly daylight, by the hand of Domenico?’92 Pater here references perhaps to a wider Victorian

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discourse which saw archaeological discovery as a kind of resurrection, or rebirth, as well as an awakening like that of Sleeping Beauty.93 The narrator wonders whether Averoldi could ‘but have stumbled on the buried Venus, now one of the central treasures of a place so rich in various art?’94 Known as Venus Victrix, the bronze statue was discovered in Brescia during archaeological excavations in 1826, and dates to the Roman imperial era.95 The narrator imagines the Venus as a muse figure, perhaps touching Averoldi and sparking his philosophy of the spirit and body. ‘It was as if Venus Victrix, lying there so near his fresh morning walks to San Pietro in Oliveto, beset him, or in those forced subterranean researches had actually set a finger in contact with him, claimed that he should restore her, too, to the light of the day.’96 Indeed, Averoldi even ponders whether now, after all this time buried beside ‘those old Brescian martyrs, they might well arise together now in the new cathedral’, pagan and Christian beauty side by side. Archaeological discoveries hold the potential for more expansive aesthetics and inclusive worldviews. The aesthetic renewal presented in ‘Gaudioso’ is presumably far more successful than those of ‘Denys’ or ‘Duke Carl’. Though Pater never finished the text, we know from the unfinished draft that Averoldi was to live ‘over eighty years’—​very unlike the tragic early deaths of Denys and Carl. Additionally, in his meditations on Romanino’s portrait at the National Gallery, recorded in ‘Art Notes in North Italy’ (1890), Pater suggests that in the sitter, ‘here certainly once more, Catholicism and the Renaissance, religion and culture, holiness and beauty, might seem reconciled’.97 In this final unfinished portrait, Pater crafts an artefact that in content and form reflect the creative potentials of archaeological discovery and the ‘beauty of a mortified kind’ he admired in Browne. The archaeological discovery, for Pater, held an intimate connection to the craft of prose writing. Reading Imaginary Portraits through archaeological discourse and a particularly Brownian archaeological aesthetic, we uncover how this influential experimental genre is grounded, so to speak, in the transformative artistic potentials of archaeological discovery.

Vernon Lee’s ‘Oke of Okehurst’ and Louis Norbert Throughout Lee’s body of work, we witness not only her aesthetic interest in historical spaces and ancient art, but also a personal, intimate connection she senses with such places and objects. In her Introduction to Genius Loci: Notes on Places (1899), Lee declares: ‘To certain among us, undeniably, places, localities […] become objects of intense and most intimate feeling. Quite irrespective of their inhabitants, and virtually of their written history, they can touch us like living creatures.’98 Lee suggests a coterie of

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‘certain among us’ who experience a special intimacy with places, who feel physical surroundings that ‘touch us like living creatures’. Lee’s interest in the supernatural, introduced in my first chapter’s study of ‘Amour Dure’ and ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, is intimately wrapped up with her conceptions of place, material culture, and art, which I argue are inherently archaeological. In ‘Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art’ (1880, 1881), Lee meditates at length on art’s capacity (or incapacity) to present the supernatural. That supernatural ‘which really deserves the name’, according to Lee, ‘is due […] to the imagination wrought upon by certain kinds of physical surroundings’.99 A sensitivity to the physical structures of place is foundational to Lee’s understanding of the supernatural. In ‘Faustus and Helena’, Lee explores her theory about the supernatural’s resistance to representation in art: ‘For the supernatural is necessarily essentially vague, and art is necessarily essentially distinct: give shape to the vague and it ceases to exist.’100 To illustrate this theory, Lee offers several examples from literature and art, providing an archaeological historiography of the relationship between the two. Referring to ancient materials including ‘[r]‌ude work, ugly, barbarous, blundering scratches on walls, kneaded clay vessels, notched sticks’—​the foundational items of archaeological study of early humans—​Lee argues that the rudest, most symbolic ancient artwork is closer to the supernatural than any ‘mature’ art can be.101 If the ibis on the amulet, or the owl on the terra-​cotta, represents a more vital belief in the gods than does the Venus of Milo or the Giustiniani Mierva, it is not because the idea of divinity is more compatible with an ugly bird than with a beautiful woman, but because whereas the beautiful woman, exquisitely wrought by a consummate sculptor, occupied the mind of the artist and of the beholder with the idea of her beauty, to the exclusion of all else, the rudely-​ engraven ibis, or the badly-​modelled owlet, on the other hand, served merely as a symbol, as the recaller of an idea; the mind did not pause in contemplation of the bird, but wandered off in search of the god.102

The ‘amulet’ and ‘terra cotta’—​rough, undefined, and symbolic—​offer possibility in their simplicity, and gaps in their fragmentariness in which the viewer can envision the supernatural. The essay offers an excellent complement to Lee’s later Preface to Hauntings, in which she claims that a real ghost is ‘one born of ourselves, of the weird places we have seen, the strange stories we have heard’.103 In ‘Faustus and Helena’ she argues that the one ‘form of the supernatural’ which remains in modernity ‘is the ghostly’.104 Further emphasising the centrality of material culture and physical sites to her conceptions of the supernatural, Lee envisions the ghost not as a human spirit, but as ‘the damp, the darkness, the silence, the solitude; a ghost is the sound of our steps through a ruined cloister […] it is the scent of the mouldering plaster and mouldering

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bones from beneath the broken pavement’. It is ‘the long-​closed room of one long dead, the faint smell of withered flowers, the rustle of long-​unmoved curtains, the yellow paper and faded ribbons of long-​unread letters’.105 Scents of human bones from subterranean spaces, sounds of feet moving through empty ruins, and the sight of faded colours on old texts are the ghosts of Lee’s fancy. This rich passage offers a taste of the stylistic experiments in her ghost stories, revising traditional approaches to the ghost as an anthropomorphic figure, ‘it’, into a set of sensual impressions and spaces. Thus, Lee turns to the archaeological imagination to counteract the limitations of art and language in representing the supernatural. Additionally, drawing from Decadent aesthetics to embrace transhistoricism and the excess of historical presences, her ghost stories feature an experimental Decadent prose which also gestures to the fragmentation and severed perspectives of modernism. Guided by Lee’s non-​fiction examinations of art, the supernatural, and ghosts, this section offers a way of reading the ‘Oke of Okehurst; Or, the Phantom Lover’ (1890) and Louis Norbert: A Two-​Fold Romance (1914) as fictional explorations of this larger study, and as unique contributions to the fin-​de-​siècle quest to innovate a Decadent prose style. ‘Oke of Okehurst’ presents a ghost story from the point of view of an artist trying, and failing, to create a portrait. Louis Norbert features an English noblewoman who teams up with an archaeologist to uncover the history of Louis Norbert, a seventeenth-​century man whose portrait hangs in the ‘Ghost’s room’ of her family home. While we can approach ‘Oke of Okehurst’ with the aid of ‘Faustus and Helena’, we can likewise read Louis Norbert through Lee’s Genius Loci and other travel writing. Alison Rutledge demonstrates that in Lee’s travel writing, including essays about the archaeological collections at the Campo Santo in Pisa and the Roman city of Arles in southern France (in The Enchanted Woods and Other Essays on the Genius of Places, 1905), she ‘slowly builds up the concepts central to her theory linking aesthetic experience, travel, history, and empathy. Most importantly, she constructs a theory that shows travel to be a transportive aesthetic experience that allows the sentimental traveller to experience a sense of connection across time and space through the creative powers of the imagination.’106 Funnelling her own archaeological and supernatural sensitivity into the unconventional ghost stories I examine here—​one narrated via artistic impressions and conceits and the other presented through an archaeological detective quest—​ Lee’s stories offer experiments with genre and form that should broaden our understandings of Decadent style, its relationship with modernism, and the role of both archaeological discourse and portraiture in these stylistic movements. While ‘Oke of Okehurst’ and Louis Norbert might not seem as obvious examples of Lee’s Decadence as ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ or ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’, these texts’ fascination with the artistic

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and archaeological processes, and their haunting portraits and atmospheres thick with the weight of the past, make them valuable for exploring the fin-​ de-​siècle interactions among portraiture, experimental prose, and archaeological discourse, helping us uncover Lee’s contribution to the discourse of Decadent style and illuminating the fin-de-siècle re-​imagining of portraiture as a visual and textual mode via archaeology.

‘Oke of Okehurst’ Though ‘Oke of Okehurst’ differs from Pater’s literary portrait genre per se, and is set, unlike Pater’s portraits, in late nineteenth-​century England, the story fits well beside Pater’s Imaginary Portraits for several reasons. One reason is of course the well-​established influence of Pater on Lee. In their edition of Hauntings, Maxwell and Pulham include Pater’s translation of a passage from Heine’s ‘The Gods in Exile’ as an appendix, more as an accompaniment to Lee’s ‘Dionea’, but also relevant to ‘Oke of Okehurst’. They note ‘how the mythic return, whether in the form of a person or artifact, can temporarily disturb or irradiate the present with an exotic beauty and power that rouses desire, fear, and a sad awareness of latter-​day lacks and deficiencies’.107 ‘Oke of Okehurst’ features a historical (and semi-​mythic) return of both a woman from the past and the material artefacts that illuminate her transhistorical sensibilities. My focus is on the story’s physical artefacts and its frequent slippage between materiality and prose. In what follows, I examine how the material culture and sites of this story both bear witness to the past and continue to detonate in the present, and tracing the text’s metadiscussion about portraiture and aesthetic creation. In ‘Oke of Okehurst’, a country squire named William Oke hires an artist to paint himself and his wife, Alice Oke, who is also his first cousin. As the artist spends time at the richly historical Okehurst, he narrates Alice’s obsession with her own ancestress and namesake, Alice Oke, née Pomfret, whose portrait hangs on the wall, and who is associated with a family scandal. Reportedly, after seventeenth-​century Nicholas Oke married Alice Pomfret, a poet named Christopher Lovelock entered the neighbourhood, becoming friends with his neighbours. His friendship with Alice was evidently too close for the comfort of Alice or Nicholas, though the exact nature of their relationship remains unclear. The Okes allegedly waylaid him on a drive and murdered him on a slip of land called Cotes Common. Rather than fearing this violent story, the Alice of the 1880s loves it. She dresses in the clothes of 1620s Alice, obsesses over her story, and collects the mementos of Lovelock, seeming all the while to commune with the past in some vague way. The story ends dramatically with the death of Alice, followed soon after by her husband.

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Lee’s story experiments with the ‘volatility’ (to borrow Denisoff’s term) of portraiture on multiple levels of narrative. Though not entitled a ‘portrait’, ‘Oke of Okehurst’ is obsessed with them. In the story’s narrative frame, Chapter I introduces an unnamed artist who narrates an unnamed listener’s encounter with a sketch which they are evidently observing. In speaking to the unnamed listener, the artist seems to speak directly to readers. Evidently gesturing to a sketch, he states, ‘Yes; that’s the same woman. I wonder whether you could guess who she was.’108 Lee’s narrator functions much like the literal frame of an unfinished sketch, directing readers’ eyes to the image within via material culture. He continues to describe the figure in the sketch through terms that evoke to readers key facets of late-​ Victorian Decadence: ‘A singular being, is she not? The most marvellous creature, quite, that I have ever met: a wonderful elegance, exotic, far-​ fetched, poignant; an artificial perverse sort of grace and research in every outline and movement and arrangement of head and neck, and hands and fingers.’109 Exhibiting an ‘exotic, far-​fetched, poignant’ beauty and ‘an artificial perverse sort of grace’, the sitter evokes the Decadent femme fatale. The narrator continues to describe his failed efforts to ultimately capture her portrait, pointing to several fragmentary sketches; ‘here she is leaning over the staircase, and here sitting in the swing’.110 He then pulls the unfinished portrait from the wall and states: ‘This is her portrait; a huge wreck.’111 The narrator sees on his listener’s face a sudden recognition. ‘Yes; you have guessed quite right—​it is Mrs. Oke of Okehurst. I forgot you had relations in that part of the country.’112 Involving readers in the discovery of the sitter and the scandalous story attached to her, the artist initiates us into the circle of readers somewhat in-​the-​know. The artist continues to recall (and thus foreshadow for the reader) Mrs. Oke’s tragic end. ‘It seemed such an appropriate end for her’, he claims. ‘I fancy she would have liked it could she have known. Ah! I shall never have another chance of painting such a portrait as I wanted. She seemed sent me from heaven or the other place.’113 Appropriate to her Decadent fatal beauty, the artist associates Alice Oke with ‘the other place’, adding to her mysterious appeal. Before recounting the full story, the artist turns her portrait around—​‘Wait; I must turn her face to the wall’—​­suggesting a supernatural sentience in the unfinished work, haunting him still.114 The unfinished portrait serves as a kind of fragmented artefact connected with a strange history, one which the artist will render for us in greater detail. His narration of ‘Oke of Okehurst’, composed entirely in prose, frequently laments the artist’s failure to express his impressions. Readers are limited by the artist’s perspective, and just as a ghost story should do (in Lee’s concept of the ghost story), the tale withholds a great deal,

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leaving the readers ‘to lift our imagination from the book’, to use Lee’s words from ‘Faustus and Helena’—​to fill in the gaps and imaginatively complete the unfinished portrait.115 When the artist arrives at Okehurst expecting conventionality, he finds instead a stunning red-​brick home ‘from the time of James I.,—​a forlorn, vast place’.116 Amazed by the beauty of Okehurst, the artist comments on the house’s ‘rows of family portraits’, as well as ‘the parapet surmounted at intervals by heraldic monsters, the wall covered with oak carvings of coats-​of-​arms, leafage and little mythological scenes’.117 There are ‘suits of court armour’ and sixteenth-​ century Persian rugs, all perfectly preserved: ‘It seemed to me that I was being led through the palace of the Sleeping Beauty.’118 The house teems with Oke family history, and the weight of centuries perfectly preserved there nearly overwhelms the artist. In his own room, he revels in ‘the extraordinary imaginative impression which this house had given [him]’. He soaks in colours, textures, and light, and notes ‘a vague scent of rose-​leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by the hands of ladies long since dead, while the clock downstairs sent up, every now and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days’.119 Here we have the setting for a ghost story that Lee ponders in ‘Faustus and Helena’, recalling the ‘faint smell of withered flowers, the rustle of long-​unmoved curtains’ she describes in this essay.120 The artist’s dreamlike experience resembles the reverie of Prince Alberic at the Castle of Sparkling Waters, a feeling of what Carolyn Dinshaw describes as asynchrony, ‘different time frames or temporal systems colliding in a single moment of now’, revealing ‘a queer temporal condition that opens up other worlds of desire’.121 The dissonant desire the artist suggests here is a kind of transhistorical Decadent pleasure, as well as the desire for the artistic capacity to represent such a crush of transhistorical sensations. He compares his historical reverie to drugged state, ‘like the half-​drunkenness of opium or haschisch […] to be conveyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require a genius, subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire’.122 Calling on the father of Decadence to represent in prose what he cannot, the artist suggests the necessity of Decadent style to capture the excesses of the moment. Just as the house surprises the artist, so does its mistress. However, the artist’s failure to capture Alice Oke’s personality in a portrait extends to his inability to describe her to the listener. The artist struggles through extended passages, often replete with em-​dashes, ultimately declaring ‘I wish I could describe her. I wish, alas!—​I wish, I wish, I have wished a hundred thousand times—​I could paint her, as I see her now, if I shut my eyes—​even if it were only a silhouette.’123 The artist features a strange multimodality in its language. Mixing heterogeneous terms and media, along with punctuation that

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highlights the fragmentation of his efforts to represent ‘the absolute reality of her’, he meditates: It is conceivable, is it not, that once in a thousand years there may arise a combination of lines, a system of movements, an outline, a gesture, which is new, unprecedented, and yet hits off exactly our desires for beauty and rareness? She was very tall; and I suppose people would have called her thin. I don’t know, for I never thought about her as a body—​bones, flesh, that sort of thing; but merely as a wonderful series of lines, and a wonderful strangeness of personality.124

The artist describes Alice not as a person but as ‘a combination of lines, a system of movements’, and ‘a wonderful strangeness of personality’—​a sort of artwork that ‘arise[s]‌’ perhaps ‘once in a thousand years’. This description melds the languages of historical discovery, unearthing, artistic media, and the late-​Victorian discourse of personality. The passage transforms the idea of the imaginary portrait arguably institutionalised by Pater just a few years before, creating a vague, ghostly portrait in prose. Lee’s narrator employs a sort of ekphrasis, except that instead of presenting a detailed textual description of a work of art, her artist provides a multimedial textual description of a subject of art in ways that confuse the boundaries between sitter and portrait. Lee repeats this method later in Louis Norbert, thus revealing ‘Oke of Okehurst’ as an early example of Lee’s larger contribution to aesthetic theory and Decadent style. The artist’s struggle to describe Alice recalls Lee’s ‘Faustus and Helena’, as well as her dedication of ‘Oke of Okehurst’ to Count Peter Boutourline, in which Lee admits that ‘to write is to exorcise, to dispel the charm’ of fantastic things, ‘that printers’ ink chases away the ghosts that may pleasantly haunt us, as efficaciously as gallons of holy water’.125 To describe Alice Oke accurately would be to destroy what is most ethereal about her. The artist declares that words could never capture what is least conventional and most wonderful about her: ‘[I]‌f the pencil and brush, imitating each line and tint, can’t succeed, how is it possible to give even vaguest notion with mere wretched words—​words possessing only a wretched abstract meaning an impotent conventional association?’126 Maxwell and Pulham point to the frustration of ‘male narrators’ across several of Lee’s haunting tales ‘to frame or put into words the spectral femininity that allures and thwarts them’, suggesting ‘among other things the elusiveness of creativity and of a certain kind of imaginative impulse’.127 Not only can the artist not describe her in a way that fulfils him, he cannot paint her, despite the 130 or so ‘preparatory sketches’ he drafts in his time at Okehurst.128 We might read the prevalence of aesthetic failure across many of these literary portraits as imbuing the genre of portraiture with a greater dynamism,

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leaving the stories of their subjects always in progress rather than static and circumscribed. In ‘The Blame of Portraits’, an essay published in Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of Life (1904), Lee argues that we are all guilty of the mistake of ‘thinking that the life of our dear ones is in an image, instead of in the heartbeats which the image—​like a name, a place, any associated thing—​can produce in ourselves. And only changing things can answer to our changing self’.129 Highlighting her sensitivity to place, Lee also emphasises the flaw in portraiture to capture a dynamic human being and their impacts on others. As the late-​Victorian vogue for mummy portraits and biographising ancient individuals implies, Pater and Lee were part of a larger effort to envision the portrait as a mode capable of suggesting an individual’s complex historical experience and identity. Requiring readers’ and viewers’ imaginations to craft a range of possibilities for the subject, the fun is in never settling on one. Deborah Maria Manion suggests that the artist’s struggle to complete a finalised portrait of Alice Oke indicates ‘that static portraiture is insufficient to capture the airy diaphane’, since ‘movement is an essential aspect of her aesthetic, and therefore must be attained, somehow, in a proper rendering of her image’.130 The intangibility of Alice’s aesthetic derives in part from the aspect of movement in space, but also from her strange transtemporal existence. Alice’s actual portrait, we might say, already exists and hangs in Okehurst. Alice Oke, we learn, is not only obsessed with her seventeenth-​century namesake and ancestress Alice Pomfret, but also closely resembles her. Alice the First’s portrait hangs in the hall, and the narrator comments on the singular resemblance between the women. He reflects on the portrait: The lady was really wonderfully like the present Mrs. Oke, at least so far as an indifferently painted portrait of the early days of Charles I. can be like a living woman of the nineteenth century. There were the same strange lines of figure and fact, the same dimples in the thin cheeks, the same wide-​opened eyes, the same vague eccentricity of expression, not destroyed even by the feeble painting and conventional manner of the time.131

The portrait itself does not impress the artist, its ‘feeble’ and ‘conventional’ approach contrasted with his more dynamic, multimodal, and unconventional imagination of the woman: ‘One could fancy that this woman had the same walk, the same beautiful line of nape of the neck and stooping head as her descendant.’132 After he comments to Alice Oke on the resemblance, he sees her pleasure at the remark, and realises that that ‘the present Mrs. Oke distinctly made herself up to look like her ancestress, dressing in garments that had a seventeenth-​century look; nay, that were sometimes absolutely copied from this portrait’.133 Modern Alice lives out the Wildean mantra that life imitates art. Indeed, the artist reveals that Alice Oke’s entire identity

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seems shaped around that of her ancestress. At first calling her desire ‘[t]‌o resemble the Alice Oke of the year 1626 […] the caprice, the mania, the pose, the whatever you may call it’, of modern Alice, the artist soon learns that his hostess’s connection with 1620s Alice is far more intimate than a ‘caprice’, and far more serious than a ‘pose’.134 The dress she wears is not a copy, but rather ‘the original dress of Alice Oke, the daughter of Virgil Pomfret’.135 Additionally, Alice constantly exhibits an ‘absent look in her eyes’ and an ‘irrelevant, far-​off smile’, and seems to the artist ‘in an eternal day-​dream’, which the artist associates with her preoccupation with the past.136 In fact, the possibility emerges that Alice’s distant looks and daydreams point to her occupation of a liminal state between two historical periods, or in both simultaneously. Denisoff suggests, ‘What [the artist] fails to realize is that such a venture could at best only reproduce the painting that already exists or –​looking at it from another direction –​that the Victorian Alice is already the closest thing to the living form, the “essence”, of the portrait painted centuries ago, even as she is her own individual.’137 While several scholars, including Denisoff, Maxwell, Pulham, and Manion have examined the queer temporal conditions and queer historical connections hinted at in ‘Oke of Okehurst’, my reading focuses on the queerness of the relationships among sitter, portrait, and representation as explored in the story’s style. In living the artwork and story with which she is obsessed, Alice Oke is a kind of dynamic, asynchronous portrait. Not merely entertaining an obsession with the former Alice Oke, the modern Alice appears intimately connected to her, sensitive always to the ghostly activity of the 1620s seemingly occurring around her. She seemed to know every word that Alice had spoken, every idea that had crossed her mind. It sometimes struck me as if she were telling me, speaking of herself in the third person, of her own feelings—​as if I were listening to a woman’s confidences, the recital of her doubts, scruples, and agonies about a living lover. For Mrs. Oke, who seemed the most self-​absorbed of creatures in all other matters […] entered completely and passionately into the feelings of this woman, this Alice, who, at some moments, seemed to be not another woman, but herself.138

This passage plays formally with the very vagueness of perspective presented in its content. Though insistent in its suggestiveness that Alice could be reincarnated, the passage makes repeated use of the slippery quasi-​transitive verb ‘seem’. Modern Alice ‘seemed to know’ all that historical Alice had said, and ‘seemed the most self-​absorbed of creatures’, while the historical Alice ‘seemed to be not another woman, but herself’. Instead of clearly defining the relationship between the women, the elusiveness of this comparison leaves plenty to the reader’s imagination. The artist claims it is ‘as

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if’ Alice were ‘speaking of herself in the third person’, and ‘as if’ he were hearing her describe her own love life instead of that of Alice the First’s. The mixture of pronouns, qualified verbs, and subjunctive mood of the passage reflect the conflicted temporality and elusiveness of the connection between the Alices. The style of the passage offers a kind of metadiscussion on the artist’s doomed attempts to capture in a static portrait a woman whose essence traverses time, and whose portrait already exists. One day, Alice reads the poems of Christopher Lovelock to the artist as they lounge in the yellow drawing room. The poems were addressed to original Alice, and as modern Alice reads them, the artist reflects on her ‘shadowy’ voice, which ‘had a curious throbbing cadence, as if she were reading the words of a melody, and restraining herself with difficulty from singing it’. He claims, ‘She evidently knew the verses by heart, and her eyes were mostly fixed with that distant smile in them, with which harmonised a constant tremulous little smile in her lips.’139 The aesthetic impression of this moment strikes the artist and he declares to himself: ‘That is how I should wish to paint her!’ Collapsing the rich description of movement, colour, sound, and posture that occupies the previous page into the mere ‘That’, the artist foretells his own failure. The far-​off look in Alice’s eyes suggests to readers that she occupies her strange liminal space and time, feeling Lovelock and the presence of the past perhaps more than she does the present. Alice’s constant abstraction, along with the story’s overall suggestion that an individual’s personality is informed by genealogy and history in quite unconventional ways, indicates that in this moment especially—​when she is perhaps most herself—​she is not collapsible onto the artist’s static, soundless canvas. Both the artist’s experience hearing Alice read Lovelock’s poetry and the story’s dramatic conclusion take place in the yellow drawing room. We learn early in the story that this room ‘has an evil reputation’, and even Mr. Oke will not visit it, though ‘so far as any one knows’, according to Alice, ‘nothing ever did happen there’.140 When the artist asks Alice how she accounts for the room’s reputation, she responds ‘in her absent voice’: ‘Perhaps something is destined to happen there in the future.’141 This chilling prophecy—​ like most of the story’s attempts to explain the supernatural qualified by ‘perhaps’—​suggests the room is haunted by what is yet to come, ‘haunted anachronistically’ in Manion’s words, or, in my own reading, a sort of future ghostly archaeological site which haunts retroactively.142 The beautiful room, unchanged since the seventeenth century, contains not only the faded papers inscribed with Christopher Lovelock’s poems, which modern Alice retrieves from ‘a complicated arrangement of double locks and false drawers’ in a cabinet but also a small portrait of Lovelock himself, dated 1626.

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Alice tells the artist that she discovered these items together in the ‘secret drawer’, fragments secreted in the yellow drawing room that contribute to our hazy vision of the Oke family ghost. Rather than exhibiting the items in her ancestral home as artefacts from her family history, Alice treasures them personally, keeping the papers hidden in their secret drawer and the portrait of Lovelock on her writing table, ‘as on an altar, [in] a small black carved frame, with a silk curtain drawn over it’.143 Like those of the amateur archaeologists in my first chapter, the artefacts in Alice’s private collection suggests that material artefacts contain dynamic and personal resonances that are amplified when treasured privately. Veiled and treasured, these are artefacts set to detonate in the present. As the story continues, the tensions in Okehurst rise, and the ghostly presence of Christopher Lovelock haunts the characters. Spurred on by his wife, Mr. Oke becomes paranoid about an intruder—​hearing voices, seeing figures, and fearing Alice’s infidelity, though whether with the titular ‘phantom lover’ or with a real man, remains unclear. Anticipating his listener’s scepticism to the theory of Lovelock’s ghost, the artist launches into an extended conjecture on the possibility of ghosts and the nature of Alice Oke and her connection to her family’s past: And when you come to think of it, why not? That a weird creature, visibly not of this earth, a reincarnation of a woman who murdered her lover two centuries and a half ago, that such a creature should have the power of attracting about her (being altogether superior to earthly lovers) the man who loved her in that previous existence, whose love for her was his death—​what is there astonishing in that? […] it explained those hours and hours spent all alone in the yellow room, where the very air, with its scent of heady flowers and old perfumed stuffs, seemed redolent of ghosts. It explained that strange smile which was not for any of us, and yet was not merely for herself—​that strange, far-​off look in the wide pale eyes.144

Still speaking hypothetically, the artist proposes that Alice is actually a reincarnation of Alice Pomfret. An unearthly, ‘weird creature’, at home in the ‘yellow room’, with its ‘scent of heady flowers and old perfumed stuffs’, Alice Oke’s association with the Decadent femme fatale is reinscribed. This is Wildean aestheticism enacted via ghost story. Focusing on the gendered and sexual dynamics of the story, Manion argues that Alice’s ‘passion in the past and her fantastical link to it as an ethereal doppelganger maker her a potential player in the narrative’s completion. Alice seems to have sublimated her “unutilizable” desire into the desire—​ artistic in its theatricality and creativity—​to see the Oke-​Lovelace narrative through to its end.’145 Alice’s obsession with her ancestors manifests as artistic creation—​an effort to realise the legend by living out its narrative and its prophesied end.

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The story’s commentary on artistic creation and the relationship between art and life is replicated formally as well. Widening our view to take in the story’s overall structure, we remember that the entire tale is sparked by the unnamed auditor’s glimpse of the unfinished portrait and the artist’s promise to tell ‘the story’ associated with its sitter ‘in detail’.146 As is appropriate to a literary portrait, and to the strange transhistorical existence it presents, the artist’s theorisation in the above quotation teems with paradox, as well as a jumble of tenses and moods. Alice is somehow ‘visibly not of this earth’—​ paradoxically visibly indistinct, or evidently unempirical. The artist combines various media and sensations as evidence for his theory; not only material artefacts like portraits, letters, and dresses, but also ‘the very air’ of the yellow room, its scents, the ineffable smile on Alice’s face, and her ‘strange, far-​off look’ are the fragments of a ghost story that is both past and future. As Maxwell and Pulham establish in their introduction to Hauntings, ‘The imaginative suggestiveness of the supernatural, which makes one find a crude sketch more haunting than a finished masterpiece, finds its way into Lee’s stories where ghostly projections are cued or triggered by blurring, breaks, gaps, fissures, ruins, relics, and fragments.’147 Such quasi-​ archaeological spaces and objects in this tale are reflected in the artist’s incomplete prose efforts to fully conceive of Alice. His reflections appear with ‘breaks’ in his sentences, often in the em-​dashes through which he qualifies his speculations and demonstrates his doubts. There are also clearly ‘gaps’ in his understanding, and ‘fragments’ of the history that he gains from its various players. The narrative is characterised by a ‘blurring’ of the artist’s senses as he negotiates Okehurst’s ‘heady and oppressive’ spaces. In addition to his drug-​like trance in his personal rooms, a later passage reveals him panicking through a strange, hyper-​coloured vision. Attempting to characterise the costume party held at Okehurst, he notes ‘noisy wretches, tricked out red, blue, purple, and parti-​coloured, as men and women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries’. Highlighting their disturbing face makeup, he suddenly recalls Cotes Common, the land on which Lovelock was killed: ‘I seemed to see that sanguine sunset, washing like a sea of blood over the heather, to where, by the black pond and the wind-​warped furs, there lay the body of Christopher Lovelock, with his dead horse near him, the yellow gravel and lilac ling soaked crimson all around; and above emerged, as out of the redness, the pale blond head covered with the grey hat, the absent eyes, and strange smile of Mrs. Oke.’148 Replicating in the style of this passage the very temporal collapse she fictionalises in this story, Lee also creates a strange portrait in prose, a near-​hallucinogenic vision that makes the artist feel ‘as if [he] had got inside a madhouse’.149 In ‘The Blame of Portraits’, Lee meditates on our ultimately doomed desire to capture the essence of a person in a portrait, calling it ‘one of our most signal cravings after the

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impossible: an attempt to overcome space and baffle time; to imprison and use at pleasure the most fleeting, intangible, and uncommunicable of all mysterious essences, a human personality’.150 Lee continues to discuss the role of the artist in these hopeless efforts. ‘For the image of the sitter on the artist’s retina’, she claims, ‘is passed on its way to the canvas through a mind chock full of other images; and is transferred—​heaven knows how changed already—​by processes of line and curve, of blots of colour, and juxtaposition of light and shade, belonging not merely to the artist himself, but to the artist’s whole school.’151 Approached through this passage, the artist’s panicked vision of Alice Oke emerging over the blood-​soaked field of heather and the body of Christopher Lovelock offers a prose version of Lee’s artistic impression. In the story’s conclusion, Alice Oke sits for her portrait in the yellow room, meditating on the nature of love and the possibilities of reincarnation. The artist hears the approach of William Oke, who signals to the artist through the doorway to follow him outside. Together, they gaze through the windows into the yellow room, where the artist sees Alice ‘sitting alone on a couch in her white dress, her head slightly thrown back, a large red rose in her hand’.152 While the artist sees Alice alone, William Oke evidently sees more: ‘ “Do you believe now?” whispered Oke’s voice hot at my ear. “Do you believe now? Was it all my fancy? But I will have him this time. I have locked the door inside, and, by God! he shan’t escape.” ’153 William sees a man with Alice—​whether a phantom conceived by his paranoia and jealousy, or the actual ghost of Lovelock, we cannot know. He barges into the room, and the artist hears a gunshot, followed by the ‘thud of a body on the ground’.154 The artist enters the yellow room and sees Alice ‘sunk down on the sofa, with her blond head resting on its seat […] a pool of red forming in her white dress. Her mouth was convulsed, as if in that automatic shriek, but her wide-​open white eyes seemed to smile vaguely and distantly.’155 The event that has haunted the room has now occurred. The red rose the artist viewed through the window seems transformed into the ‘pool of red’ now spread on Alice Pomfret’s white dress, worn by Alice Oke for her portrait. And modern Alice’s eyes appear ‘to smile vaguely and distantly’ as they have throughout the story. William Oke exclaims, ‘The damned rascal has given me the slip again!’ and dashes out of the house in chase of his ghostly enemy. He soon shoots himself, dying a few days later. In the story’s final sentence, the artist brings in another artefact that serves as suggestive evidence of the history he has related: ‘a locket which was found round [Alice’s] neck, all stained with blood. It contained some very dark auburn hair, not at all the colour of William Oke’s. I am quite sure it was Lovelock’s.’156 Still sticking to suggestion rather than explication, Lee’s story turns to material culture to

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insinuate the supernatural history of ‘Oke of Okehurst’. Even the narrator is only ‘quite sure’ that the lock of hair is that of Alice’s historical lover—​ Lovelock—​another, quite on-​the-​nose example of the story’s play with form mirroring content. The story’s constant slippage of multimedial terms, and its insistence that Alice works like an artist to live out a family legend, foregrounds Lee’s experimentation with material culture, the supernatural, and the aesthetic process. We might read Alice as imitating not just art, but also archaeology, anticipating and bringing into existence a future history in the yellow room through her collection of otherworldly impressions and material artefacts. Alice’s death seemingly realises the legendary prophecy of Nicholas Oke, that ‘when the head of his house and master of Okehurst should marry another Alice Oke, descended from himself and his wife, there should be an end of the Okes of Okehurst’.157 However, as Alice has already demonstrated, death is not always the end. Invoking the problem of futurity and a queer historical condition introduced by Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Lee’s story posits an alternative form of lineage and futurity outside of traditional heteronormative and patriarchal structures, one that we may well call queer.158 But additionally, central to the late-​Victorian genre of the prose portrait is the fragmentary or suggestive art that remains from history, poised for encounter and inviting viewers to speculate: What came of them? The portrait of Alice Pomfret-​Oke remains, as do the various artefacts in the yellow room and the many sketches of our artist-​narrator—​an encounter with which began our story. Drawing from the historical associations of portraiture with heredity and lineage, and engaging with Lee’s theory of empathy, Denisoff argues, ‘Although this anxious attack seals the Okes’ hereditary fate, it does nothing to keep the overwhelming empathy between the Alices from being inherited by some future individual through the aesthetic admiration of what has now, due to the heroine’s adaptation of her ancestor’s identity, become a painting of both women.’159 Just as Pater’s portraits emphasise the continued possibility for cultural revival in encounters with death and the act of unearthing, Lee’s ‘Oke of Okehurst’ proposes the transhistorical empathy, to borrow Denisoff’s term, made possible through fragmentary material culture and unearthly aesthetic impressions. To better understand the significance of the experimental style of ‘Oke of Okehurst’, we can productively turn to Louis Norbert (1914), in which Lee explores new possibilities for the relationship between art, life, and prose in another portrait, and in another archaeological storyline. Uncovering connections across these two texts, we unearth Lee’s greater contribution to the fin-​de-​siècle experiment with archaeological Decadent prose.

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Louis Norbert: A Two-​Fold Romance Louis Norbert: A Two-​Fold Romance begins at the Campo Santo in Pisa in 1908, where the ‘young archaeologist’ (as he is named throughout) leads the British noblewoman Lady Venetia Hammond through the archaeological collections.160 As suggested in his designation as the ‘young archaeologist’, the masculine protagonist’s youth, naiveté, and arrogance are central to his character. In Louis Norbert we witness archaeology’s reputation as a young discipline through this central figure. Though we may look back at early twentieth-​century archaeology as still unempirical and often irresponsible, Lee’s novel reveals a rather humorous view of archaeology’s pedantry, pretension, and devotion to dry and frustratingly sceptical empiricism. On the other hand, Lady Venetia Hammond exhibits a more personal, romantic, and imaginative approach to the past. The tension between these two approaches is a major theme of the novel. In her essay on ‘Pisa and the Campo Santo’, published in The Enchanted Woods, and Other Essays on the Genius of Places (1905), Lee reflects on the variety of people entombed there beside the ancient sarcophagi and beneath the medieval tapestries. ‘For my own part’, she claims, ‘I am glad of this jumble; it humanizes the place, takes it a little out of the Past, which has so long ceased to be alive that, like the painted people on the walls and the sculptured people on the sarcophagi, it seems scarcely to have gone through the bitterness, the solemnity, of dying.’161 Reading this passage, Alison Rutledge claims, ‘The experience of the Campo Santo, then, this jumble of objects from various centuries, allows the images of people long since dead to retain some element of vitality for Lee. By disrupting any sense of historical chronology, the Campo Santo brings the past into the present.’162 Lee goes on to suggest that when visiting, ‘one may spell out, or make up for one’s self, the legends of some of these saints’, and then launches into a rich, sensual reflection of such ‘mak[ing] up’. Scattering ellipses and em-​dashes in her meditation, Lee formally plays with the associative and intuitive quality of her meditation on the artefacts: … . And while thus lazily at work, our eye suddenly falling on the bas-​relief—​ say, that of the chariot-​horses dragging poor young Hippolytus—​of some pagan sarcophagus, or caught by the blond helmeted serenity of a fine head of Ares… . The cloister mullions frame in, above the ivory-​tinted marbles of the opposite wall, the cathedral cupola shaped like a dry poppy-​head, and the pomegranate-​shaped dome of the baptistery—​reddish and purple and frosted with white; […]163

Lee’s meditation on the artefacts in the Campo Santo, and her claim that this meditation is a kind of ‘work’, suggests her sympathy with Lady Venetia. As Lady Venetia and the archaeologist walk through the Campo Santo

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in the prologue of Louis Norbert, Lady Venetia stops suddenly ‘before a sepulchral slab’ and exclaims, ‘Good heavens—​why, this is he.’164 ‘With the resigned disinterestedness of disappointment’ that she has stopped listening to his lecture, the archaeologist’s ‘eyes followed the lady’s, now fixed on a marble tablet, small, unornamented and (he added to himself with vindictive criticalness) remarkably poorly lettered for its date, which was the end of the seventeenth century’.165 When after reading the inscription he asks her, purely for the sake of politeness, who Louis Norbert de Caritan was, Lady Venetia appears abstracted, much like Alice Oke, or perhaps like Vernon Lee in the face of historical fragments. ‘Lady Venetia at first took no notice of the question and still less of the tone. Her very beautiful eyes […] were fixed on that slab, as if she were looking through it and its wall to some distance beyond; and despite the conventional self-​control she always attempted to cultivate, it was perfectly obvious that she was moved far beyond surprise or curiosity.’166 She finally answers, ‘Who Louis Norbert de Caritan was? Well, that is exactly what we none of us in my family have ever known and probably ever will know.’167 Thus begins the mystery. Like ‘Oke of Okehurst’, the story commences with a fragmentary artefact, or in this case, two. More explicitly engaged with archaeological research than ‘Oke of Okehurst’, the tale unfolds like an archaeological detective investigation carried out between the archaeologist in Pisa and Lady Venetia later from her family home in England. When we read it alongside Lee’s travel essays, we can uncover the more implicit archaeological conceits of Louis Norbert and witness Lee’s contribution to the archaeologically inspired prose portrait genre. While the archaeologist and Lady Venetia warm to each other and their respective methodologies, the contrasts between their approaches foreground archaeological discourse as thick with tensions between imagination and evidence, speculation and proof, invention and discovery—​while also revealing the genuinely blurred lines between these supposedly distinct approaches. These hazy distinctions offer rich material for the stylist. Early in the story, when Lady Venetia eagerly speculates on Louis Norbert’s death, supposing the villainous priest Abbe Manfredini murdered him—​a suspicion that, like most of her theories, turns out to be completely true—​ the archaeologist remarks on her imagination: ‘Why, it is you, not I, who ought to have been an archaeologist’, to which she coldly replies, ‘I could not possibly have disliked anything more.’168 Foregrounding the archaeologist’s perhaps surprising connection of archaeology with imagination, along with Lady Venetia’s clear assumption that archaeology is anything but imaginative, the prologue introduces some of the paradoxes of archaeological research that these two characters will negotiate for the remainder of the narrative.

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The novel is composed mostly of letters exchanged between the archaeologist and Lady Venetia, interspersed with sections presented by a third-​person narrator, telegrams, and passages from historical books and correspondence from the story’s historical personages (which are usually transcribed in letters between the archaeologist and Lady Venetia). The novel takes shape as an archaeological and personal quest to unearth the story of Louis Norbert, a seventeenth-​century man adopted from France into Lady Venetia’s family, and whose portrait hangs on the wall of the ‘Ghost’s room’ in her family home, Arthington. Rutledge has argued that the novel’s strange form ‘disrupts any sense of forward-​moving linear time and enacts the experience of the characters who are themselves being drawn back and forth between past and present’.169 She claims, ‘The collection of texts that constitute the novel approaches the style of literary modernism because the form of Louis Norbert gestures toward verisimilitude while at the same time undermining itself.’170 Drawing at times from Rutledge’s incisive reading, I reveal how, through its archaeological reading and compilation process, and in its debates over the role of invention in historical and archaeological research, Louis Norbert produces an experimental style through alternative modes of knowing the past. In her descriptions of the portrait of Louis Norbert, Lady Venetia evokes the ghostly romance between Alice Oke and her own family past. In fact, just like the yellow room, the ‘Ghost’s room’ is called that, according to Lady Venetia, though ‘[n]‌o one had ever seen or heard a ghost in that particular room’.171 However, instead of a future accident that haunts the room, the ‘Ghost’s room’ appears haunted, if by anything at all, by the family secret of Louis Norbert which our protagonists eventually uncover. Lady Venetia recalls being locked in the room by her brother as a child and encountering the portrait for the first time. Rather than referring to the portrait as ‘it’, she refers to ‘him’, claiming, ‘I see it quite clearly in my mind; I mean I see him, for it never struck me to think of him as a portrait!’, eliding the boundary between the subject and his image.172 Though initially frightened when locked in the room, she claims ‘I stopped being frightened as soon as I saw him. He was so awfully kind and sad, as if he wanted to help me, and at the same time (and that was more to the point) he wanted me to help him.’173 She recalls that she ‘dozed off and dreamed all sorts of lovely things; I’m not sure he didn’t want to marry me at the end, anyhow I remember I helped him in some mysterious way’.174 This childhood dream presages adult Venetia’s quest to uncover Louis Norbert’s true identity and to expose the story of his tragic death. Explaining that as she matured she spent more time with his portrait, she claims, ‘I liked to tell him stories and invent them about him’, invoking the genre of the imaginary portrait in which this tale participates.175 To supplement the stories Lady Venetia tells,

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she and the archaeologist uncover correspondence about and by Norbert in the family archives at Arthington and in various archives and libraries in Italy. Venetia and the archaeologist record extracts from these historical letters in their own correspondence, piecing together the fragments of Louis Norbert’s life and death. The archaeological biographising process presented in Louis Norbert gestures back to the Fayum portrait craze of the 1880s introduced in my first chapter. Dominic Montserrat explains that in the 1890s, just a few years after the Fayum portraits were uncovered from Egypt and displayed across Europe and Great Britain, archaeologists unearthed a collection of ‘documentary papyri’ from the same region. ‘These papyri’, he asserts, ‘with their vivid but fragmentary evocations of daily life in the towns of Roman Egypt’, were covered considerably in the press. And, ‘Although the papyri and the portraits were unrelated historically, they came from the same geographical area and seemed at the time to complement each other perfectly: the papyri brought back to life the portraits (by extension, the mummified bodies inside as well), and vice versa.’176 Venetia narrates the discovery of documents in the family archive as vivid personal encounters with Norbert himself. She initially spurns the idea that her ‘dear Louis Norbert’ would ‘have any connection with all those stuffy horrors’ recorded in the ‘Muniment Room’ at Arthington, preferring not to associate him with such dry family and national history. However, she writes to the archaeologist that ‘as if he had heard me, Louis Norbert has turned up! At least, I mean, a reference to him has’.177 Correcting herself immediately after assigning Louis Norbert agency in his appearance, Lady Venetia continues to profess the intimate emotions she experiences through his presence in the archive. ‘Just think how I felt! It was the fourth time I have seen his name […] that I have seen his beloved name except written by you or me. Just think of that! But then archaeologists are accustomed to such emotions, digging up Troy and the Olympia Hermes and things like that.’178 Directly comparing her discovery to more famed archaeological excavations, Venetia emphasises the archaeological nature of the mystery they seek to solve; additionally, Lee here gestures to the late-​Victorian practice of constructing the life stories of historical portrait subjects through archaeological and archival exploration. Throughout their correspondence, Venetia and the archaeologist argue, sometimes flirtatiously, sometimes more seriously, about their different methodologies. The archaeologist describes the ‘sympathetic clairvoyance’ through which Venetia immediately ascertains the villain of Norbert’s story.179 But the archaeologist too at times reveals a romanticised interest in the past. As they leave the Campo Santo early in the novel, the narrator describes ‘that deep, closed gate, unopened doubtless for centuries, with the archaic lion among the bushes on its battlements; that gate which always

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made the young Archaeologist, who, after all, was secretly a poet, think most unscientifically of the East, of Saladin and Cœur de Lion, and at the same time, more unscientifically still, of primæval Greece, Mycenæ or Argos’.180 The romantic passage recalls Lee’s meditation at the Campo Santo discussed above. When the archaeologist shares ‘this impression’ with Lady Venetia, she frankly responds, ‘Then you are not a pedant and afraid of seeming one.’181 They discuss openly their earlier encounter with Louis Norbert’s epitaph, and when the archaeologist explains that he ‘didn’t know what manner to put on, and put on the wrong one’, she declares: ‘Exactly. You did not know what to make of my romancing, as you thought it. You were wondering whether I was an amateur novelist or a planchette and crystal reader. And in the doubt you thought it extremely proper that I should be snubbed by a scientific mind.’182 This early disagreement highlights popular assumptions about archaeology’s rising prestige across the turn of the twentieth century and the self-​importance that came along with it. The passage also reveals the fraught relationship developing in the early twentieth century among the genre of romance, spiritualism, and archaeology—​discourses that in the 1880s and 1890s often intertwined in popular literature. The tension between scientific and imaginative approaches appears throughout the text, as do surprising moments where the scientific and the romantic seem more closely aligned than the characters expect. Lady Venetia writes to the archaeologist eagerly awaiting news from his visits to the archives in Italy, which have been closed. Urging him to visit the archives as soon as they open to ‘see whether you can’t find out something about’ Louis Norbert, she adds, ‘Or, if you can’t find out anything, make it up! After all, aren’t you archaeologists everlastingly inventing?’183 In her enthusiasm to learn about Norbert, Venetia introduces the theme of invention to their correspondence. She suggests teasingly that archaeologists perhaps ‘invent’ more than they care to admit. In his reply, the archaeologist acknowledges her playful advice and responds, ‘Ah, dear Lady Venetia, you little know with what a dreadful temptation you are besetting a hitherto innocent student of history!’184 He implies that Venetia’s eager and creative approach to the mystery, though truly tempting, threatens to sully his innocence as a scholar. And yet, recalling this exchange at a later point, he tells her: ‘Well, I venture to say the same to you—​invent! it is but another form of the Latin word that means to discover!’185 Reaching archaeologically through the etymology of ‘invention’, the archaeologist proposes a tantalising slippage between scientific discovery and creative invention. Out of character, he advocates a kind of model of archaeological imagination embedded in the form of the imaginary portrait and exercised by many of the archaeological encounterers I have examined throughout this book. He asserts, ‘Invent your Louis Norbert. Believe me, you have begun already,

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long, long ago, when you first saw his portrait in your childhood. Why not continue?’186 However, Venetia responds badly to his suggestion: ‘I hate you and your “inventions”.’ She adds, ‘And never have I felt less inclined to make up […] than at this moment’, before describing her discovery of two letters written by Louis Norbert himself. ‘For this very day I have come into his real presence, the first time since, as a small girl, I discovered his portrait; and really, I don’t think I have had such another emotion between that time and this!’187 She rejects his patronising suggestion to ‘invent’ Louis Norbert, in part because she has uncovered more intimate, physical artefacts connected to him—​pieces which to her offer ‘his real presence’. Rather than mere stand-​ins for his presence, material artefacts are somehow the very presence of Norbert itself. Lee’s Lady Venetia presents archaeological and archival relics as dynamic and seemingly alive. By virtue of their hiddenness, their discovery, their fragmentariness, and their requisite interpretation, they offer something close to the ‘real presence’, of a person or the ‘essence’ that portrait artists sought to capture. However, Lady Venetia possesses other tools of historical insight. She and the archaeologist develop a theory that Louis Norbert was the legitimate heir to Louis XIV of France. She declares in a letter; ‘Well! I have not invented, unless inventing may mean (by the way, you hinted something to this effect)—​may mean discovering the truth.’188 Venetia reports that she ‘had a vision, quite distinct’.189 Her letter describes the vision in detail, presenting a scene in historical Brouage. She declares: ‘I saw the place as if I were in it’: ‘a tiny dismantled fortress, all grown with wild fig and caper, above the half-​silted harbour and the dreary, dreary salt marshes’. She sees below ‘the town or village, low houses, whitewashed but all weather-​stained’; ‘A coach drawn by six grey mules—​I suppose they used them in the South of France—​ drove slowly round and round the bastions, with the brown toasted elm leaves raining down on it.’190 Painting the scene in vivid colours and details that official accounts might neglect, Venetia offers another form of historiography. She continues to witnesses the birth and secreting away by political agents of the infant Louis Norbert from his mother, Marie Mancini, the legitimate wife of Louis XIV. ‘The woman in the bed suddenly moaned and turned over on to her side’, as a man covers a ‘thing’ in ‘his sleeve’ and carries it out. ‘Then the woman in the bed suddenly sat up like galvanised and stared as if she didn’t see, and then shrieked and shrieked and twisted her hands until she began to sob and fell back exhausted—​and then I saw nothing more.’191 Lady Venetia’s narration offers an almost ekphrastic discourse on her trance, one that the text proposes as a mode of historiography. Lady Venetia has access to the private the experiences of Marie Mancini through her vision, because she possesses what Rutledge calls ‘imaginative empathy’, a quality the archaeologist lacks.192 Though Marie Mancini eventually

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published memoirs, they contain ‘absolutely no mention either of a marriage or a child’, a fact the archaeologist raises as damaging to her theory. However, the absence of these events in her memoirs are also in part because, according to Lady Venetia, Marie could not say ‘anything that could compromise or incense the King’ whom she feared.193 Lady Venetia, unlike the male archaeologist, recognises how dangerous it can be for women to publish their private lives. The archaeologist responds quite predictably to the news of her trance-​ like revelation. He accuses her of being ‘less of a disbeliever in occultism than’ she claims to be. ‘And what, given such belief, could be more natural or rather supernatural than that your strange sympathy with the poor youth who died in 1684 should enable you to see into his past, however hidden from ordinary investigation?’194 He again compares her to ‘a poet or novelist’, and with a faux humility calls himself ‘a poor plodding historian’, who must ‘protest, in the name of historical documents, against the gratuitous interpretation of’ her vision.195 In the archaeologist’s pedantry, we intuit Lee’s suggestion that modes of ‘ordinary investigation’ draw broad strokes over history, missing too often its richest details and significant private experiences—​particularly those of women. Indeed, the methodological tension in the story has clearly gendered implications. In one of Lady Venetia’s most compelling letters, she lambasts the archaeologist for his sexist treatment of her methods. She references an imaginative story she told early in the novel, one to which the archaeologist refers often when he cites her creative abilities: I mean that you having, long ago, heard me talk about some imaginary friends and make up foolish stories and dialogues about them (as every human being except historians and my dull ambassador cousin naturally does)—​well, having chanced to hear me talk about Hermann and Isabella and the double-​bass player and Italo, you have written me down as a foolish woman with a hopeless tendency to romancing about everything, what you call a born poet or novelist. Almost the most riling part of it is this amiable attempt (so like a man towards a woman!) to turn an unjustifiable accusation into a compliment—​of course that all hangs together with your recommending me to invent […] And now you think I am inventing, I suppose. And all the time it is you, my poor young, learned friend who have been inventing, inventing a me utterly unlike the reality.196

Rutledge argues that in this powerful passage, ‘Lady Venetia reveals how the archaeologist is actually guilty of the same tendency for fiction and “inventing” of which he accuses her. The archaeologist, however, has been guilty of fictionalising Lady Venetia and of dismissing her historical theories as mere romantic stories.’197 Rutledge also reads Lady Venetia’s anger as showing how ‘the novel is both destabilizing the privileging of scientific

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knowledge over art and also undermining the assumption that historical accounts are not on some level stories constructed out of the imagination of the historian’.198 Lady Venetia maintains her conviction in her theories at the expense, quite humorously, of historians. ‘I suppose these historians would say that none of all this can have happened, because of the letters they have discovered in the National Library or the Affaires Etrangères, or whatever it is […] How is it that these historical bigwigs don’t see at a glance that the letters they are publishing are a sham?’199 What Lady Venetia finds utterly obvious remains outside of the purview of historical ‘bigwigs’, who take the documents in their collections at face value. What Lady Venetia and the archaeologist uncover, however, is that the story of Louis Norbert exists almost entirely in cypher. When unearthing the story of Louis Norbert’s life, the protagonists become immersed in the criminal intrigues of seventeenth-​century Italy—​ where Norbert travels with Lady Venetia’s ancestor, Anthony Thesiger. Spies, bravos, and poisoning abound. In a letter to Thesiger, Norbert references ‘the manifold wickedness of this country’, where ‘[e]‌very man doeth justice and taketh vengeance for himself’.200 In The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, Ivory examines the fascination of especially queer late-​Victorian stylists with criminality during the Italian Renaissance. She argues, ‘There are elements of what would become known as Renaissance culture that served to expand the horizon of sex researchers and sexual dissidents, that offered the possibility of moving conceptions of same-​sex relationships out of the realm of Hellenist aesthetic and pedagogical ideals into the realm of “real” experience—​of illicit sexual encounters, of the body, of criminality.’201 Ivory’s reading invites us to see Lee’s engagement with the hidden crimes of Renaissance Italy in Louis Norbert as part of a wider body of works that turned to these illicit activities to craft experimental styles and genres, like the literary portrait. The archaeologist writes to Lady Venetia, ‘Indeed, I am inclined to think (after a week in these Pisa archives) that the whole life of the seventeenth century was honeycombed with mysteries, and that there were as many secret chambers as inhabited ones.’202 The archaeologist hints at what Lady Venetia already intuits, that the real history of seventeenth-​century Italy, along with the real story of a person’s character, exists in ‘secret chambers’, and cannot be accessed in official documents and normative historiographies. Because Norbert is secretly the legitimate heir to the French throne, spies and assassins accost him throughout his travels. The archaeologist uncovers messages composed ‘in some code language’; ‘I mean that they are, if they exist at all and are not mere imagination (like Hermann and Isabella), in cypher, or rather cryptogram […] That is to say, that, if they exist, they exist in single words and phrases which must be picked out of books according to a clue which has in each case to

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be discovered.’203 The true history of Louis Norbert hides encoded in secret correspondence between himself and a seventeenth-​century woman named Artemisia, with whom he was in love. Like archaeological artefacts, the documents of this undisclosed history are incomplete, and readers must be initiated, or ‘in the secret’ to decipher them.204 Eventually, the archaeologist and a young Italian woman discover the mode of encryption. Contrasting her with Lady Venetia, whom he calls ‘a born poet and novelist, that is to say, a superlative historian’, he refers to his new Italian friend as ‘not a poet nor a novelist, but a hereditary antiquarian and born archaeologist, that is to say, considerably of a detective’.205 Returning again to ‘that theme with variations’, the archaeologist contrasts Lady Venetia’s intuition—aligning creativity with the study of history—​with his new colleague’s skills. Alluding to her family’s historical collections in the phrase ‘hereditary antiquarian’, the archaeologist also suggests paradoxically that one might be ‘born’ into archaeology—​a discipline to which he assigns scientific precision. He then combines these qualities into the famous figure of Victorian realist fiction, the detective, a figure some might see as at odds with aestheticism and the artistic impression. While he dismisses Lady Venetia’s alternative modes of knowing the past, he turns to the detective figure to suggest a similar conviction, that the past is full of secrets that must be not merely studied, but detected through a variety of instinct and logic. Ultimately, Lady Venetia maintains that the sanctioned documents of history might prop up authorities’ arrogance, but fail to reveal the real experiences of complex individuals. The ‘real reports’ of Louis Norbert’s birth, she claims—​‘such horrible compromising things’—​have been burned, and in their stead ‘these silly blinds’—​the official documents—​‘have remained’.206 And yet, in the novel’s conclusion, both Lady Venetia and the reader are left to wonder whether the archaeologist has finally invented the last historical document transcribed, the autobiography of Louis Norbert’s mother. The archaeologist writes to Lady Venetia, claiming, ‘I told you that, rather than leave your curiosity unsatisfied, I was ready, like Faust and others among my fellow pedants, to sell my soul. I have now done so, and I venture to send you herewith registered, and as a humble Christmas greeting, its price.’207 Claiming that the autobiography is written in a language that Lady Venetia does not know, and which he is unwilling to identify, the archaeologist sends his own translation. In a postscript, he adds: ‘I must not forget to warn you that, like other persons who have entered into similar agreements with the Evil One, I am bound over to complete discretion concerning the details thereof. I must therefore entreat you to desist from all questions concerning the original of this document and its whereabouts, let alone the manner in which it has come into my hands.’208 What does he mean that he has sold his soul? Has the archaeologist ultimately ‘invented’ the text which contains

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the love story of Louis Norbert and Artemisia del Valore, and of Norbert’s tragic murder—​the missing piece of the history? Lady Venetia exclaims in her response that she ‘do[es] not know (and the more I think it over the less I can decide!) whether I believe you to be a dealer in stolen goods or a poet!’209 Readers too are left questioning whether the archaeologist has succumbed to such criminal temptations as he and Lady Venetia have been reading about for months in their seventeenth-​century forays, or whether, to please her, he has committed the ultimate scholarly crime of forging a historical source. The unsolved mystery of the final document underlines the novel’s ultimate proposal—​that the truth of Louis Norbert, and presumably any historical figure, is inaccessible solely through empirical, sanctioned means. Real histories with meaning are often encrypted, secret, and require ‘a web of fact and fancy’ to be uncovered.210 Much like her theorisations on the supernatural which can be productively read alongside it, Lee’s approach to archaeological study in Louis Norbert suggest that history cannot be reliably uncovered, circumscribed, or represented in unadventurous ways. In its collision of empiricism and romance, Louis Norbert offers a kind of commentary on the tensions of early twentieth-​century modernity and the aesthetic forms through which it will be represented. The paradoxes of archaeological discourse offer Lee unique opportunities to examine these tensions at work, and to explore them in multimodal, stylish, and experimental ways.

A lantern in the catacombs: Brownian prose in Woolf’s Orlando One of Vernon Lee’s most noted inheritors, modernist Virginia Woolf, likewise exhibits an interest in portraiture and the genre’s opportunities for formal experimentation. Reading Lee’s ‘Oke of Okehurst’ alongside Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), Dennis Denisoff foregrounds Lee’s influence on Woolf, claiming that both writers ‘use the malleable potential of visuality and aesthetics to break portraiture’s characteristic inflexibility and, along with it, the fixed notions of gender and sexuality that it reinforces’.211 Denisoff’s rich reading of the revisionary gender politics of ‘Oke of Okehurst’ and Orlando invites us to explore other ways these texts’ investments in portraiture engage with key fin-​de-​siècle discourses, like that of aesthetics (on which Denisoff also focuses), style, and archaeology. In this chapter’s concluding section, I read Woolf’s Orlando in connection with Lee’s and Pater’s experimental portraits. In particular, I unearth how, just like Pater, Woolf’s prose experiments with historical artefacts develops through her interest in that seventeenth-​century polymath, Thomas Browne. In Orlando, Lee’s ‘phantom lover’ meets Pater’s prosodic archaeologist.

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In The Decadent Republic of Letters (2013), Matthew Potolsky investigates the epideictic mode in decadent literature, arguing that ‘decadent writing, so long associated with isolation, withdrawal, and nihilistic repudiation, is in fact preoccupied with communities’.212 Decadent writers, he explains, registered and created communities by lavishing praise on favourite books. Concluding this chapter devoted to Decadent prose with a return to Brownian archaeology in Woolf, I suggest the resurgence of Browne at the turn of the twentieth century as part of the creation of a transhistorical Decadent prose community. Woolf herself expresses her sense of literary inheritance in the Preface to her 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography. She opens the Preface: Many friends have helped me in writing this book. Some are dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in the debt of Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott Lord Macaulay, Emily Brontë, DeQuincey, and Walter Pater, —​to name a few.213

The list of living contributors that follows the dead ones is quite long, but includes Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, and the British Museum.214 Thus, from the beginning, Woolf invites her reader to recognise the moments in the text in which Browne surfaces (and they are not few), while preparing her reader to consider literary legacy and inheritance. This Preface places Orlando in a Decadent and modernist genealogy, and because of the vast time span across which the plot moves, establishes Orlando the character as a portable, transhistorical Decadent figure. In her 1919 essay ‘Reading’, Woolf ponders Browne, who appears in many of her essays: ‘His imagination was made to carry pyramids […] But then the grain of dust was a pyramid.’215 Like Pater and several other admirers of Browne in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Woolf venerates Browne as an imaginative explorer, devoted to mysteries in all shapes and sizes. In addition to ‘Reading’, she discusses him in ‘Hours in a Library’ (1916), ‘Is This Poetry?’ (1919), ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’ (1925), Orlando (1928), and in a 1923 review of a limited edition of his collected works by the Golden Cockerel Press. The man whose ‘imagination was made to carry pyramids’ was also, Woolf speculates, ‘one of the first of our writers to be definitely himself’; ‘In that dark world, he was one of the explorers; the first to talk of himself’, emphasising Woolf’s interest in Browne’s exploration of personality and character, central tenets of the prose portrait and modernism.216 An attention to Browne’s focus on the self reverberates throughout each of her discussions. In ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’, she claims, ‘He it was who first turned from the contacts of men with men to their lonely

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life within.’ Woolf then pictures the internal self as a catacomb, one which Browne was the first to explore in his prose: ‘All was mystery and darkness as th[is] first explorer walked the catacombs swinging his lanthorn.’217 Illuminating the dark, often subterranean spaces with which he is associated, Browne also illuminated the private inner life. Woolf imagines the inward turn of the artist as an archaeological exploration into the catacombs of the self. I want to suggest that for Pater and Woolf, the vision of the inner life as a catacomb to be explored or excavated was shaped by Browne, and that it is not merely metaphorical, but intimately connected to actual archaeological discovery. Like Pater decades before her, Woolf privileges Urn Burial over Browne’s other works, claiming in her 1923 review of the Golden Cockerel Press edition of his works, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’: ‘Locked up in Urn Burial there is a quality of imagination which distinguishes it completely from its companions.’218 That this innovator of modernist prose, who described her writing process for Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as ‘dig[ging] out beautiful caves behind my characters’, should have been so profoundly influenced by Browne’s archaeological text in particular, deserves more attention.219 Woolf’s reflections highlight a vital link between conceptions of archaeological discovery, obsession with death and decay, and the formal experimentations with psychic interiority that characterise modernist literary expression. In her review, Woolf describes Urn Burial as ‘a temple’: ‘Here it is all a question not of you and me, or him and her, but of human fate and death, of the immensity of the past, of the strangeness which surrounds us on every side.’220 ‘Here as in no other English prose except the Bible the reader is not left to read alone in his armchair but is made one of a congregation.’221 Comparing the community of Urn Burial’s admirers to the community beholden to the Bible, Woolf suggests an almost sacred quality in Browne’s prose. Her appropriations of Browne in her essays, and later in Orlando, repeat this rhetorical move, refracting the broad human implications of Urn Burial back onto English soil, and envisioning a community connected through literary style—​a transhistorical English ‘church’ of Brownian prose. Thus, while Lee turned most often to Italy, her adopted homeland, for aesthetic and historical reference points, Woolf unearths a distinctly English history for her Decadent prose. As part of Woolf’s almost-​religious reverence for the effects of Browne’s prose, she delights in its illuminative powers, and she contrasts light and dark throughout her appropriations of Browne. Woolf’s references to illumination recall Pater’s essay decades before, in which he describes Browne’s skill: Like the Soul, in Blake’s design, ‘exploring the recesses of the tomb,’ he carries a light, the light of the poetic faith which he cannot put off him, into

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those dark places, ‘the abode of worms and pismires,’ peering round with a boundless curiosity and no fear; noting the various casuistical considerations of men’s last form of self-​love; all those whims of humanity as a ‘student of perpetuity,’ the mortuary customs of all nations, which, from their very closeness to our human nature, arouse in most minds only a strong feeling of distaste.222

Pater emphasises again that what ‘most minds’ would find distasteful, Browne peers into with curiosity, investigating and illuminating the ‘dark places’. In her ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, Woolf reflects: ‘For the imagination which has gone such strange journeys among the dead is still exalted when it swings its lantern over the obscurities of the soul. He is in the dark to all the world; he has longed for death; there is a hell within him.’223 Woolf, like Pater, presents Browne as intimately knowledgeable about death, as a lantern-​bearer through the spaces of the dead and the soul itself. Also like Pater, Woolf foregrounds the importance of prose over poetry in Browne’s legacy. Pondering Browne’s ability to rouse the question of the author himself, she writes, ‘The truth is the question never presents itself quite so acutely in the case of a poet. It scarcely presents at all in the case of the Greeks and Latins. The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.’224 Here, Woolf implies that prose, rather than poetry, allow us to know our author, that it takes on the body and mind of its creator in almost tangible ways. Similar to Pater before her, Woolf’s reflections on Browne repeatedly emphasise the materiality of his language. Quoting a long excerpt of Urn Burial one in which Browne addresses ‘the iniquity of oblivion’ and the fact that ‘Mummy is become merchandise’, Woolf’s ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ then launches into a prolonged meditation on the experience of the text. She highlights its heterogeneity, its multisensory catalogue, its scope, and its rhythm: It is as if from the street we stepped into a cathedral where the organ goes plunging and soaring and indulging in vast and elephantine gambols of awful yet grotesque sublimity … There is, too, his power of bringing the remote and incongruous astonishingly together. A piece of an old boat is cheek by jowl with the funeral pyre of Patroclus. Vast inquiries sweeping in immense circles of ambiguity and doubt are clenched by short sentences rapped out with solemn authority … The great names of antiquity march in astonishing procession; flowers and trees, spices and gems load the pages with all kinds of colour and substance…225

Meditating on pages full of ‘colour and substance’, Woolf highlights the collision in Browne’s text between the remote and incongruous—​the familiar and exotic—​together in a discussion of quite local burial urns.

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The novel’s engagement with portraiture and morbidity begins early in Orlando, in the opening lines’ strange description of Orlando ‘slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters’ and at times ‘cut[ting] the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again’. ‘Orlando’s fathers’, the narrator explains, ‘had ridden in fields of asphodel […] and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hand from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed.’ Denisoff offers a rich reading of the ‘spill of heads’ in Orlando, which he notes ‘is echoed by an equal proliferation of visual portraits whose figures, although conventionally intended to signify that the heads of the family and the nation remain securely in place, are often presented as severed by the picture frames, if not bodiless.’226 He addresses the opening scene, reflecting on ‘the constructed quality of masculinity’ it presents: ‘This macabre little gallery is, like more conventional portrait galleries, both a national and a family heirloom […] Orlando’s amateurish performance of masculinity undermines the naturalised ideal of authority personified by the father and reinforced by a rhetoric of national, religious, and class-​based superiority.’227 Denisoff compares Orlando to Alice Oke, referring to the ‘seemingly innumerable galleries scattered throughout the family home’, which ‘ensure that Orlando, the living embodiment of one extended lineage, remains as keenly aware of ancestry as Alice Oke does’. But, he’s far ‘[l]‌ess fulfilled by such bonds than Alice’. ‘The family portraits function only to sustain class and gendered privileges, without transferring any of the empathy and affection for which Orlando yearns.’228 Denisoff’s reading of Lee’s and Woolf’s revisionary portraiture focuses on the texts’ critiques of portraiture’s gendered and sexual conventions. This reading invites us to uncover other ways Lee and Woolf’s stories work together, and how they join a larger group of writers who turn to portraiture, the imagery of layers, and transhistorical connections to craft innovative prose styles at the turn of the twentieth century. Orlando’s fascination with portraiture and morbidity intensifies after his first extended sleep, following his desertion by the Russian princess Sasha. When he awakes, he develops ‘a strange delight in thoughts of death and decay’.229 The servants note ‘a light passing along the galleries’ of his home, as he wanders, ‘looking at picture after picture as if he sought the likeness of somebody whom he could not find’.230 In his search through familial faces, the text suggests that Orlando searches unsuccessfully for self-​identification. When the portraits and the family pew fail to impress, ‘he must descend into the crypt where his ancestors lay’.231 In his exploration, Orlando searches beneath his feet, taking a lantern into the catacombs just like Woolf’s Browne, ‘the first explorer walk[ing] the catacombs swinging his lanthorn’,

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turned to ‘the lonely life within’.232 Woolf’s ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’ invites us to read Orlando’s crypt exploration as both a search for identification with his ancestors and as an investigation of himself. After ‘taking his lantern and seeing that the bones were in order’, sobbing in misery over Sasha, and returning to the galleries, Orlando pulls a chair to a table and opens the works of Browne.233 As Orlando resembles in thought and action Woolf’s vision of Browne, he thinks of Browne himself, the crypt scene thus depicting multiple layers of encounter, or meta-​encounter. Orlando’s meditations in the crypt resemble Browne’s indictments of human pride. Browne disparages man’s attempts to outlive time: ‘[T]‌o subsist in bones, and be but Pyrimidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves a fruitlesse continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as Emblemes of mortall vanities.’234 Similarly, Orlando’s biographer narrates: It was a ghastly sepulcher; dug deep beneath the foundations of the house as if the first Lord of the family, who had come from France with the Conqueror, had wished to testify how all pomp is built upon corruption; how the skeleton lies beneath the flesh; how we that dance and sing above must lie below…how the ring (here Orlando, stooping his lantern, would pick up a gold circle lacking a stone, that had rolled into a corner) loses its ruby and the eye which was so lustrous, shines no more.235

Woolf’s Orlando, ‘stooping’ with his lantern over his ancestor’s corpse, further recalls Woolf’s Browne, who, ‘Swooping and soaring at the highest altitudes […] stoops suddenly with loving particularity upon the details of his own body.’236 At this moment, Orlando grasps a skeleton’s hand, ‘bend[ing] the joints this way and that’—​his encounter with the corpse, if read through Woolf’s discussions of Browne, suggesting that Orlando investigates his own body as well.237 Speculating on what the hand might have done when it was living, he suddenly stops, replaces the hand, and thinks ‘how there was a writer called Thomas Browne, a Doctor of Norwich, whose writing upon such subjects took his fancy amazingly’.238 As Orlando resembles in thought and action Woolf’s vision of Browne, he thinks of Browne himself. This textual moment contains a remarkable anachronism. In Orlando, Queen Elizabeth dies just before Orlando falls in love with Sasha, and thus before the crypt scene. In reality, Elizabeth I died in 1603, two years before Browne was born and 55 years before the publication of Urn Burial. Thus, Orlando’s knowledge of Browne and the presence of his book in Orlando’s house is even more striking. As Orlando fails to identify with his own ancestry, and thinks of the anachronistic Browne instead, the text suggests that he is part

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of a transhistorical, non-​familial lineage—​resisting generational temporality he participates in a Decadent collective. Orlando’s encounter with Browne’s text, impelled by his crypt exploration, not only reproduces the thematic concerns of Urn Burial, but also brims with a diction and style that any reader familiar with Browne’s Urn Burial will immediately find familiar. He ‘proceeded to investigate the delicate articulation of one of the doctor’s longest and most marvellously contorted cogitations’.239 The text here replicates Browne’s rich alliterative style, suggesting that Browne’s prose has infused the biographer’s own. Reflecting on the pitiful remains of his ancestors, renowned for battles and hunting, he thinks, ‘[W]‌hat remained? A skull; a finger.’240 The biographer asserts, ‘Whereas, he said, turning to the pages of Sir Thomas Browne’: Like an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind and the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lest they should outstare this page, we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead, embalmed rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing —​and Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man [Browne] and his words were immortal.241

Here, melodiously and almost materially entombed in modernist prose, Browne achieves the desire for immortality evident in the ‘Emblemes of mortall vanities’ on which Urn Burial meditates. Woolf’s catacomb as a material and psychological space in which Orlando encounters himself can be read through her critical appreciation for Browne. However, we might also infer that this Brownian image reaches her by way of Pater, and possibly Lee too. In his Conclusion to The Renaissance, Pater meditates on ‘impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them’, and claims: [T]‌he whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.242

Pater here envisions the ‘individual mind’ as a ‘chamber’ surrounded by a ‘thick wall of personality’. Impressions in this space merely ‘flicker’, ‘burn and are extinguished’ in a moment. Given his admiration for Browne, who, in Pater’s words, ‘carries a light, the light of the poetic faith which he cannot put off him, into those dark places’, it is more than tempting to read Pater’s

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vision of the cavernous mind through Browne, and Woolf’s catacomb through Pater.243 Pater’s famous model of consciousness also looks forward to Lee’s vision of portraiture in ‘The Blame of Portraits’, discussed above, in which ‘the image of the sitter on the artist’s retina is passed on its way to the canvas through a mind chock full of other images’.244 These models of consciousness and their role in artistic production reveal the shared interest among Pater, Lee, and Woolf in the stylistic experimentation required to represent a dynamic human life and personality. The cavern and crypt imagery in Woolf’s Orlando has particular implications for English literature. Woolf’s Orlando returns to Browne again much later in the novel, in the process of reinforcing both her love for England and her dedication to prose. Upon returning from Turkey, female Orlando feels suddenly less inspired as she stands in the family crypt. ‘She thought of the Egyptian pyramids and what bones lie beneath them as she stood in the crypt; and the vast, empty hills which lie above the Sea of Marmara seemed, for the moment, a finer dwelling-​place than this many-​roomed mansion.’245 As Orlando reflects on her evolution, the biographer states, ‘Slowly there had opened within her something intricate and many-​chambered, which one must take a torch to explore, in prose not verse; and she remembered how passionately she had studied that doctor at Norwich, Browne, whose book was at her hand there.’246 Again, Woolf relies on the image of the dark chambers of the self, requiring a torch for exploration. But here, she adds the importance of prose to this archaeological exploration of the self, and connects it directly with Browne. Woolf repeats this image also in A Room of One’s Own (1929), a volume based on lectures delivered in October 1928, the month in which Orlando was published. Reading Mary Carmichael’s surprising sentence, ‘Chloe liked Olivia’, the narrator reflects: ‘For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.’247 Women’s lives, and implicitly also women’s experiences of their own bodies, remain unexpressed in literature: ‘It is all half lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping.’248 In this imagery, which subtly suggests female genital anatomy, Woolf’s image of Browne lighting dark caverns evolves into a particularly feminist motif for writing women’s biographical prose. Applied in Orlando, the image points to ‘something intricate and many-​ chambered’ in need of illumination, and identifies prose as the required mode. Immediately after this reflection on Browne, ‘whose book was at her hand there’, Orlando produces ‘twenty-​six volumes’ of prose.249 She opens her window to take in the English scene around her—​‘the damp night air’, a fox barking in the woods, ‘the clutter of a pheasant’, and ‘the snow

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slither[ing] and flop[ping] from the roof to the ground’.250 The biographer continues: ‘ “By my life,” she exclaimed, “this is a thousand times better than Turkey”.’251 Orlando tosses her Turkish cheroot out of the window, and goes to sleep. Her return to Browne sparks a renewed love for both prose and for England. This strange family gallery—​composed of prose portraits by Pater, Lee, and Woolf—​offer us an unconventional genealogy for Decadent prose across the turn of the twentieth century. Moving from Pater’s Brownian archaeology and conception of the imaginary portrait genre, through Lee’s experiments with transhistorical empathy and archaeological processes, into Woolf’s caverns of consciousness, we unearth a thread of archaeologically invested literary portraits of human character. Denisoff reads ‘the layering of identity described by Orlando’s narrator’ through Lee’s ‘definition of beauty’, presented in ‘The Sense of the Past’ ‘as a building up of experiences of empathy that transgress time’. He cites Woolf’s note on a draft of Orlando that ‘character goes on underground before we are born; and leaves something afterword [sic] also’.252 Identifying these models of character, beauty, and experience through the language of strata and underground exploration, Denisoff implicitly invokes the archaeological discourse which I seek to tease out in this chapter. Examining the archaeological inspirations of not only Lee’s and Woolf’s experiments with portraiture, but also across a wider body of literature that includes Pater and reaches back to Thomas Browne, I have sought to expose the multilayered ‘character’ of Decadent prose at the turn of the twentieth century. Uncovering how these writers draw from archaeological meditations and methods to conceive of new forms and genres, we recognise a Decadent prose style with links backwards to a seventeenth-​ century discovery of burial urns, and forwards to canonical modernism.

Notes 1 Quoted in Elisa Bizzotto, ‘The Imaginary Portrait: Pater’s Contribution to a Literary Genre’, in Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (eds), Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2002), p. 214. 2 Lene Østermark-​ Johansen, ‘Pater and the Painterly: Imaginary Portraits’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–​1920, 56:3 (2013), 345. 3 Bizzotto, ‘The Imaginary Portrait’, p. 214. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., pp. 214–​215. 6 Arthur Symons, review, Time n.s. VI (August 1887), 157–​162. Quoted in Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage, 178–​179.

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7 Denisoff’s Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film 1850–​ 1950 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Ivory’s The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850–​ 1930 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Colleen Denney, Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 8 Denisoff, Sexual Visuality, pp. 78, 98. 9 Yvonne Ivory, Homosexual Revival, pp. 3–​4. 10 Bizzotto, ‘The Imaginary Portrait’, p. 215. 11 Alex Murray and Jason David Hall, ‘Introduction’, in Jason David Hall and Alex Murray (eds), Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 16–​17. 12 Walter Pater, ‘Style’, in Appreciations, With an Essay on Style [1889] (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 11. 13 Ibid. 14 Walter Pater, The Renaissance [1873] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 124. 15 Pater, The Renaissance, p. 89. 16 Walter Pater, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, in Appreciations, With an Essay on Style [1889] (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 154. Pater here quotes Browne’s Urn Burial. 17 Ibid., p. 134. 18 Lewis Richard Farnell, An Oxonian Looks Back (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1934). 19 Thomas Browne, Urn Burial and the Garden of Cyrus [1658] (Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 143; Pater, The Renaissance, 120. 20 Browne, Urn Burial, p. 143. 21 Pater, The Renaissance, p. 120. 22 Walter Pater, ‘The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture’, in Greek Studies [1895] (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 190. 23 Linda Dowling, ‘Walter Pater and Archaeology: The Reconciliation with Earth’, Victorian Studies, 31:2 (1998), 209. 24 Ibid., p. 221. 25 William Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 98. 26 Ibid., pp. 97–​98. 27 Lene Østermark-​ Johansen, ‘Sculpture, Style, and Pater’s Imaginative Sense of Touch’, in Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins (eds), Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 104–​105. 28 Pater, The Renaissance, p. 89. 29 Ibid. 30 Martine Lambert-​ Charbonnier, ‘Poetics of Ekphrasis in Pater’s “Imaginary Portraits” ’, in Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (eds), Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2002), pp. 202, 207. 31 Ibid., p. 203.

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32 Pater, The Renaissance, p. 195. 33 Pater, Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures [1893] (New York, 1895), pp. 3–​4, original italics. 34 Quoted in Murray and Hall, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 35 Havelock Ellis, Affirmations [1898]. 2nd edn (Houghton Mifflin, 1915), p. 175. 36 Walter Pater, ‘The Myth of Demeter and Persephone’, in Greek Studies [1895] (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 112. Surprisingly, Heather Love does not address this passage in Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007), though Pater’s curious search for lost fragments might help illustrate the link she aims to draw ‘between his aesthetics of failure and his experience of bearing a marginalized sexual identity’, p. 56. 37 Walter Pater, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’, in Imaginary Portraits [1887] (New York, 1899), p. 159. 38 Dowling, ‘Walter Pater and Archaeology’, p. 221. 39 Quoted in R.M. Seiler, The Critical Heritage of Walter Pater (Routledge, 1995), p. 55. 40 Dowling, ‘Pater and Archaeology’, p. 220. 41 Shuter, Rereading, p. 106. 42 Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 82. 43 Østermark-​Johansen, ‘Pater and the Painterly’, p. 350. 44 Pater, ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’, in Imaginary Portraits [1887] (New York, 1899), p. 57. 45 Ibid., p. 60. 46 Ibid., pp. 62–​63. 47 Ibid., p. 69. 48 Ibid., p. 74. 49 Ibid., p. 77. 50 Ibid., p. 78. 51 Ibid., p. 79. 52 Dowling, ‘Walter Pater and Archaeology’, p. 220. 53 Pater, ‘Denys’, p. 79. 54 Ibid., p. 80. 55 Ibid., p. 81. 56 Pater, ‘A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew’ [1876]. Reprinted in Greek Studies [1895]. (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 26. 57 Pater, The Renaissance, pp. 119–​120. 58 Stefano Evangelista, ‘A Revolting Mistake: Walter Pater’s Iconography of Dionysus’, Victorian Review, 34:2 (2008), 202. 59 Ibid. 60 Pater, ‘Denys’, pp. 87–​88. 61 Pater, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 152. 62 Ibid. 63 Pater, ‘Duke Carl’, pp. 178–​179.

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64 Ibid., p. 154. 65 Evangelista, ‘A Revolting Mistake’, p. 214. 66 Pater, ‘Duke Carl’, p. 160. 67 Ibid., pp. 158–​159. 68 Ibid., p. 160. 69 Gerald Monsman, Pater’s Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 131. 70 Ibid., p. 132. 71 Ibid., p. 134. 72 Pater, ‘Duke Carl’, p. 178. 73 Ibid., p. 137. 74 Monsman, Pater’s Portraits, p. 136. 75 See Lambert-​Charbonnier, ‘Poetics of Ekphrasis’, p. 208. 76 Gerald Monsman, ‘Pater’s Portraits: The Aesthetic Hero in 1890’, Expositions 2.1 (2008), 84. 77 Walter Pater, ‘Gaudioso, the Second’ [ca. 1890] Reprinted in Gerald Monsman, ‘Pater’s Portraits: The Aesthetic Hero in 1890’, Expositions 2.1 (2008), 92. 78 Ibid., p. 93. 79 Monsman, ‘Pater’s Portraits’, p. 88. 80 Pater, ‘Gaudioso, the Second’, p. 90. 81 Monsman, ‘Pater’s Portraits’, fn.13. 82 Pater, ‘Gaudioso, the Second’, p. 91. 83 Ibid., p. 94. 84 Pater, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 134. 85 Pater, ‘Gaudioso’, p. 92. 86 Pater, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 154. 87 Pater, ‘Gaudioso’, p. 94. 88 Ibid., p. 91. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 See Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, pp. 9, 111. 94 Pater, ‘Gaudioso’, p. 91. 95 Monsman, ‘Pater’s Portraits’, fn. 19; the statue is on display, recently restored, at the Parco Archaeologico di Brixia Romana. 96 Pater, ‘Gaudioso’, p. 94. 97 Pater, ‘Art Notes in North Italy’, in C. Shadwell (ed.), Miscellaneous Studies (London: Macmillan, 1895), pp. 103–​104. 98 Vernon Lee, Genius Loci: Notes on Places. 1899. Reprint (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1907), p. 3. 99 Vernon Lee, ‘Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art’, 1880, 1881, in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, by Vernon Lee (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), p. 296.

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00 Ibid., p. 295. 1 101 Ibid., p. 299. 102 Ibid., p. 300. 103 Vernon Lee, Preface to Hauntings: Fantastic Stories, 1890, in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales by Vernon Lee (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), p. 39. 104 Lee, ‘Faustus and Helena’, p. 309. 105 Ibid., p. 310. 106 Alison Rutledge, ‘Louis Norbert and the Travel Essays of Vernon Lee: Aesthetic Empathy, the Genius Loci, and the “Historical Emotion” ’, English Literature in Transition, 62:3 (2019), 362. 107 Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham, Introduction, in Maxwell and Pulham (eds), Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales by Vernon lee (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), p. 14. 108 Vernon Lee, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, 1890, in Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds), Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, by Vernon Lee (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), p. 105. 109 Ibid., pp. 105–​106. 110 Ibid., p. 106. 111 Ibid., p. 106. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., p. 107. 115 Lee, ‘Faustus and Helena’, p. 293. 116 Lee, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, p. 110. 117 Ibid., p. 111. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., p. 112. 120 Lee, ‘Faustus and Helena’, p. 310. 121 Dinshaw, How Soon is Now?, pp. 5, 43. 122 Lee, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, p. 112. 123 Ibid., p. 114. 124 Ibid., p. 114. 125 Ibid., p. 105. 126 Ibid., pp. 114–​115. 127 Maxwell and Pulham, Introduction, p. 12. 128 Lee, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, p. 143. 129 Lee, ‘The Blame of Portraits’, in Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of Life (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1904), pp. 144–​145. 130 Deborah Maria Manion, The Ekphrastic Fantastic: Gazing at Magic Portraits in Victorian Fiction. Ph.D. Doctor of Philosophy thesis, University of Iowa, 2010, pp. 170–​171. https://​doi.org/​10.17077/​etd.qybb8​sbs 131 Lee, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, p. 119. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid.

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34 Ibid., p. 122. 1 135 Ibid., p. 130. 136 Ibid., pp. 124, 129. 137 Denisoff, Sexual Visuality, p. 104. 138 Lee, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, p. 131. 139 Ibid., p. 127. 140 Ibid., p. 125. 141 Ibid. 142 Manion, The Ekphrastic Fantastic, p. 169. 143 Lee, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, p. 128. 144 Ibid., pp. 142–​143. 145 Manion, The Ekphrastic Fantastic, p. 169. 146 Lee, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, p. 107. 147 Maxwell and Pulham, Introduction, p. 13. 148 Lee, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, pp. 138–​139. 149 Ibid., p. 139. 150 Lee, ‘The Blame of Portraits’, p. 140. 151 Ibid., p. 142. This model closely recalls Pater’s model of consciousness and impressions from his conclusion to The Renaissance, in which he claims, ‘Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without’, p. 119. 152 Lee, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, p. 152. 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid. 156 Ibid., p. 153. 157 Ibid., p. 134. 158 Queer readings of ‘Oke of Okehurst’ and broader approaches based on gender and sexuality have been well established by Denisoff, Maxwell and Pulham, Manion, and others. 159 Denisoff, Sexual Visuality, p. 103. 160 Later, the archaeologist indicates in a letter that his name is Schmidt, though he is never called this in the text. See Vernon Lee, Louis Norbert: A Two-​Fold Romance (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1914), p. 100. 161 Vernon Lee, ‘Pisa and the Campo Santo’, The Enchanted Woods, and Other Essays on the Genius of Places (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 2nd edn, 1910), p. 20. 162 Rutledge, ‘Louis Norbert’, p. 362. 163 Lee, ‘Pisa and the Campo Santo’, p. 22. 164 Lee, Louis Norbert, p. 9. 165 Ibid., p. 9. 166 Ibid., p. 10. 167 Ibid.

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68 Ibid., p. 18. 1 169 Rutledge, ‘Louis Norbert’, p. 368. 170 Ibid. 171 Lee, Louis Norbert, p. 27. 172 Ibid., p. 29. 173 Ibid., p. 30. 174 Ibid., p. 31. 175 Ibid., p. 32. 176 Dominic Montserrat, ‘Unidentified Human Remains: Mummies and Erotics of Biography’, in Montserrat (ed.), Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 172–​173. 177 Lee, Louis Norbert, p. 83. 178 Ibid., p. 84. 179 Ibid., p. 41. 180 Ibid., p. 22. 181 Ibid., p. 23. 182 Ibid. 183 Ibid., p. 55. 184 Ibid., p. 60. 185 Ibid., p. 101. 186 Ibid., p. 102. 187 Ibid., p. 104. 188 Ibid., pp. 143–​144. 189 Ibid., pp. 145–​146 (original italics). 190 Ibid., pp. 146–​147. 191 Ibid., pp. 147–​148. 192 Rutledge, ‘Louis Norbert’, p. 366. 193 Lee, Louis Norbert, p. 171. 194 Ibid., p. 154. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid., pp. 168–​169. 197 Rutledge, ‘Louis Norbert’, p. 365. 198 Ibid. 199 Lee, Louis Norbert, p. 166. 200 Ibid., p. 112. 201 Ivory, Homosexual Revival, pp. 14–​15. 202 Lee, Louis Norbert, p. 75. 203 Ibid., pp. 76, 123, original italics. 204 Ibid., p. 234. 205 Ibid., p. 235. 206 Ibid., p. 167. 207 Ibid., pp. 265–​266. 208 Ibid., pp. 266–​267. 209 Ibid., p. 301. 210 Ibid., p. 238.

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11 Denisoff, Sexual Visuality, p. 98. 2 212 Potolsky, Decadent Republic, p. 6. 213 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1973), p. vii. 214 Ibid., p. viii. 215 Virginia Woolf, ‘Reading’ [1919], in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, 1919–​1924 (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 155. 216 Ibid. 217 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’, in The Common Reader (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925), p. 70. 218 Virginia Woolf, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, 1919–​1924 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), p. 369. 219 Woolf, ‘30 Aug. 1923’, in Leonard Woolf (ed.), A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf (San Diego: Harcourt, 1954), p. 59. 220 Virginia Woolf, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 369. 221 Ibid. 222 Pater, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 155. 223 Woolf, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 371. Woolf here glosses Browne’s Religio Medici, in which he asserts, ‘I feel sometimes a hell within myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me.’ 224 Woolf, ‘Reading’, p. 157. 225 Woolf, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 370. 226 Denisoff, Sexual Visuality, p. 106. 227 Ibid., p. 110. 228 Ibid., p. 111. 229 Ibid., p. 70. 230 Ibid. 231 Ibid. 232 Woolf, ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’, p. 70. 233 Woolf, Orlando, p. 72. 234 Browne, Urn Burial, p. 44. 235 Woolf, Orlando, p. 71. 236 Woolf, ‘Lumber Room’, p. 71. 237 Woolf, Orlando, p. 71. 238 Ibid., p. 72. 239 Ibid. 240 Ibid., p. 81. 241 Ibid. 242 Pater, The Renaissance, p. 119. 243 Pater, ‘Sir Thomas Browne’, p. 155. 244 Lee, ‘The Blame of Portraits’, p. 142. 245 Woolf, Orlando, 174. 246 Ibid., p. 175.

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47 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1929] (Orlando: Harvest, 1989), p. 92. 2 248 Ibid., p. 92. 249 Woolf, Orlando, p. 175. 250 Ibid., p. 176. 251 Ibid. 252 Denisoff, Sexual Visuality, p. 107; see Woolf, Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Oliver Bell, vol. 2: 1920–​1924 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 156.

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3 Archaeology and authenticity

[W]‌hen that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan, and sail round the high-​pooped galleys, as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable […] Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be. But before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying. (Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’)1

If the archaeologist in Vernon Lee’s Louis Norbert did truly invent the ­novel’s final fragment to complete the romance, he would have been in fairly good company at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, even Howard Carter and his patron Lord Carnarvon reportedly pedalled fakes before they hit the jackpot at Tut’s tomb. Thomas Hoving (former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) reveals that three gorgeous ancient Egyptian headdresses which were ‘bought in Egypt and smuggled out’ by Carter and Carnarvon and displayed for around seventy years, were revealed in 1986 to be ‘mostly phonies, made of a majority of modern gold pieces added to a few truly ancient ones’.2 ‘One wonders’, states Hoving, ‘if Carter was really fooled by the 1920s fakers of the headdresses or was himself the purveyor of fakes to the Met.’ Hoving cites the fact that the men both ‘swiped some precious objects from Tut’s tomb and concealed others for eventual clandestine export’, concluding that ‘chances are he knew the pieces were forgeries’.3 Such a story sparks a different sort of ‘wonder’ than that Carter famously expressed upon his discovery of the tomb, but an important sort of wonder, nonetheless. In this chapter, I turn somewhat away from the more canonical aesthetes and modernists of the previous chapter, uncovering how archaeological debates at the fin de siècle shaped literary and aesthetic discussions

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about legitimacy, value, and authenticity. In the last few years, scholars of nineteenth-​century studies have exhibited a heightened fascination with fakery, forgery, and deception, and Wilde’s phrase ‘beautiful untrue things’, has gained a lot of traction.4 This rich recent work points to the massive interest (often Wilde-​centred) in nineteenth-​century negotiations of authenticity in literature, art, and financial or cultural institutions. This chapter adds to this scholarship by expanding the focus on Wilde and addressing a phenomenon that has not been fully explored in the cultural history of the fin de siècle—​the archaeological forgeries which both consumed the popular press and infiltrated some of our most lauded museum galleries. In Fake: The Art of Deception (1990), Mark Jones claims that in the nineteenth century, the mania for collecting ‘created a paradise for dishonest dealers’, suggesting that fakes ‘are, before all else, a response to demand, an ever changing portrait of human desires’.5 While the earlier chapters of this book address fake archaeological artefacts such as the lost Ricketts portrait of Willie Hughes (the hypothesised dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets in The Portrait of Mr. W.H.), this chapter tracks a more powerful and pervasive connection between archaeology, desire, and wider discourses of authenticity at the fin de siècle. Lee’s Louis Norbert offers a helpful transition between the previous chapter and this one, not only in the possibility that the pompous archaeologist has sold his soul and forged facts, but also in its introduction, through Lady Venetia’s jabs, of some early twentieth-​century frustration with the newly adopted arrogance of archaeology as a discipline and its rejection of amateur voices. As my previous chapters have shown, though traditionalists often appealed to archaeology to endorse cultural, racial, and national hierarchies, archaeological discourse also fulfilled desires to challenge such authority and upend sanctioned versions of history. While Chapter 1 shows how queer writers embraced the fragmentary and suggestive nature of archaeological materials to unearth silenced histories and represent non-​normative desire, this chapter examines how figures both within and far outside academic institutions turned for similar reasons to archaeology and archaeological forgery. Unfortunately, accounts penned by forgers themselves remain inaccessible for fairly obvious reasons. Much like the art forger, who Briefel notes ‘must repress his own identity so that his paintings can be taken for genuine Da Vincis or Michelangelos’, the archaeological forger must obscure all traces of modernity in their artefact, erasing themselves from the record.6 And yet, as I discuss below, some forgers also became celebrities of sorts when their dirty deeds were exposed. This chapter addresses a range of scandals and spurious items across the turn of the twentieth century. Turning to archaeological handbooks and articles in the popular press by a community of archaeologists, anthropologists, art

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collectors, and critics such as Scottish archaeologist Robert Munro, English archaeologists John Evans and T.G. Wakeling, and fantasy writer Andrew Lang—​many of whom are in direct dialogue with each other—​this chapter ultimately reveals how the fragmentariness of the material record and the subjective experience of archaeological encounter helped rewrite longstanding conceptions of intellectual hierarchy, legitimacy, and the sanctioned historical narrative. One of the more remarkable features of fin-​de-​siècle forgery discourse is how it anticipates contemporary archaeology’s move towards more dynamic approaches to historical sites and items. British art historian and former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum Mark Jones argued in 1990 that ‘a new concept of authenticity is emerging which encourages us to accept that objects have a continuing history, that they are damaged and repaired, cleaned and restored, and that their present state records not only the moment of creation but also a whole subsequent sequence of events.’7 This chapter explores how, a century before this ‘new concept of authenticity’, British writers were forced to navigate the often-​messy continuing histories of both authentic and spurious artefacts, accepting the actually fluid boundary between the two categories. Archaeological forgeries demanded that writers at the fin de siècle appreciate artefacts and the stories they tell as subjective and dynamic, rather than objective and static. Additionally, while the standard tale of disciplinarity at the turn of the twentieth century traces a shift into specialised expertise—​the last thirty years of the nineteenth century ‘long associated with the institutionalization and professionalization of the human sciences: aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, sexology, and economics’, according to Regenia Gagnier—​conversations about archaeological forgery simultaneously call into question the infallibility of the expert and the secreting of knowledge behind a velvet rope.8 Debates over archaeological authenticity invoke a range of people from the margins of intellectual and aesthetic communities, breaking down and transforming categories of historical and aesthetic authority.

Archaeological forgeries at the fin de siècle Forgeries of historical artefacts were everywhere in the nineteenth century. The development of archaeology as a discipline and the prolific excavations carried out across the British empire, the rise of museum culture and the profusion of private collections, and the push to educate the masses through exposure to art—​all of these factors created a desire for historical materials that could not be fully satisfied through legitimate means. Art and museum scholars including Hoving and Mark Jones, as well as

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literary scholars like Aviva Briefel and Sara Malton, all identify the nineteenth century as a time when fakes pervaded the market, and debates about them were heated. Jones subtitles the section of his book on the nineteenth century, ‘The Great Age of Faking’, while Hoving offers a chapter entitled ‘Victorian Shenanigans’. Jones claims that in the nineteenth century, the mania for collecting ‘­created a paradise for dishonest dealers’: ‘As each new craze took off a sudden imbalance between supply and demand created the perfect opportunity for such people to peddle their wares before a pool of expertise had been c­ reated.’9 And yet, as this chapter will show, claims to expertise—​and types of expertise—​were as numerous and diverse as the artefacts in question. In ‘The Forgery of Antiquities’, an 1893 article for Longman’s Magazine, archaeologist John Evans addresses many of the most common forged items over several centuries. From forged lapidary inscriptions—​‘which began centuries ago, and many were the forgeries that were palmed off on the antiquaries of the Renaissance period’—​to engraved ancient gems—​like amethyst scarabei, along with ‘the golden necklace of King Menes, not by an Egyptian jeweler, but by an artificer near Drury Lane’.10 From ancient pottery—​the forgeries of which ‘are so numerous that it would be hopeless to attempt to trace all the different varieties of fraud that have been ­perpetrated’—​to ‘forgeries of Roman terra-​cotta lamps’; Italian majolica, Dresden china, enamels, ‘Arab lamps of glass’, carved ivories, and forged ancient coins galore.11 There were also Biblical fakes from the Holy Land: the ‘sarcophagus of Samson, the coins of Moses, the seal of King David’.12 But we must not forget also the Neolithic implements of the wanderer Flint Jack, the Tiara of Saitaphernes that fooled experts at the Louvre, and the fake mummy trade. To create a mummy, according to a writer in the Norwich Mercury: ‘A skeleton is obtained, the first process being to swathe it round with bandages steeped in preparation of Bergundy pitch and resin, with dry spices and dust. The parcel is then sent to Egypt to be “naturalised,” and returned in a [pseudo-​sarcophagus] covered with hieroglyphics.’13 Or, one could take the route of the German doctor, who embalmed a woman’s corpse, wrapped her up, and sold her to a collector, not expecting the scent of death to give him away.14 Evans also addresses Tanagra figurines—​small statues uncovered in the ancient town of Tanagra, Greece, and across Asia Minor, that inspired a craze across Europe and thus were newly manufactured by the ­thousands.15 An article in the Sphere from 1924, which details an Exhibition of Counterfeits at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in Savile Row, London, reveals that ‘[n]‌inety per cent. of Tanagra figures are accepted by those who know as spurious.’16 Indeed, modern Tanagras appeared side-​by-​side with authentic ones in museums like the South Kensington, as one writer in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph laments, most of which are ‘the handiwork of an

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exceedingly skillful artist in Athens, who, with his sons, has for years past supplied the demand for “genuine” Tanagra statuettes all over Europe and America.’17 ‘Each society, each generation,’ Jones remarks, ‘fakes the thing it covets most.’18 Quite simply, fin-​de-​siècle fakes, forgeries, counterfeits, and shams are woven extensively into the fabric of our material record, and offer unique ways of understanding the desires of the people who created and coveted them. The appearance of fakes in museum collections should not be too surprising. Indeed, quite often, the very institutions built to uphold sanctioned narratives and heuristics of value spurred the proliferation of such fakes, undermining their own efforts. Hoving notes that the Victoria and Albert Museum, which strove to educate and create better citizens through art, made replicas of pieces using casts, which then became available to forgers for their own activities.19 Barbara Black explains, ‘In the museum the reverence for art quickly turns into a kind of irreverence that allows the museum crowd to imitate and copy at will. Although one may assume that the museum functions as the preserve of the unique work of art, it is more accurately the despoiler of originality and the arena of duplication.’20 Such irony suffuses the forgery narrative at the fin de siècle. The very institutions that seek to preserve authenticity and hierarchies also make possible their own subversion. While scholars from sanctioned academic and museum institutions claimed (and continue to claim) uncanny abilities to (sometimes literally) sniff out spurious objects, creators of fakes, often with no formal education at all, were credited with their own ineffable artistic genius. Such discussions about forgers and those who exposed them challenged and shaped the discourse of archaeological expertise just as the discipline was beginning to solidify, creating alternate routes into authorised knowledge. The rest of this chapter delves into such alternate routes and epistemologies of authenticity. Beginning with texts by a range of archaeologists and authorities at the fin de siècle, I consider how forged artefacts shaped and subverted archaeological ways of reading, constructing a discourse of empirical expertise that strayed often into more intuitive and impressionistic modes of analysis. Such conversations among a close community of archaeological experts are often provocatively aligned with fin-​de-​siècle discussions of the aesthetic modes of realism and aestheticism, and reveal how fakes transformed the language of archaeological and aesthetic authenticity. Moving beyond the centres of academic authority, the next section addresses the outliers—​ the artists, blue-​collar craftsmen, and radicals who saw an opportunity in archaeology’s fragmentary archive and the insatiable appetite of collectors. From the roving flint-​knapper Flint Jack to the Russian artist responsible for the gorgeous Tiara of Saitaphernes, famous fabricators invited authorities

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to transform their notions of artistry and expertise, thus reconfiguring archaeological epistemologies. The third section delves into the blurry lines at the fin de siècle between categories of fakery, and between authentic and inauthentic, revealing how archaeological forgeries in all their complexity demanded more relative and dynamic approaches to the material past. The chapter concludes with the story of the remarkable recent underwater excavation of a shipwreck of ancient treasures, one which highlights how archaeological discovery can realise Vivian’s hope in ‘The Decay of Lying’ that ‘Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land.’ Indeed, Wilde serves as a sort of guardian angel of this chapter. Because recent scholarly work on Wilde’s relationship with forgery and fakery is so pervasive and rich, I do not thoroughly analyse his texts below. However, Wilde’s body of work offers a valuable response to prominent fin-​de-siècle representational modes and approaches to the past, one that influenced various figures in the aesthetic community and holds massive sway in our understanding of late-​ Victorian aesthetic discourse. As discussed in my first chapter, Wilde praises the Shakespearean stage for its use of archaeology in recreating historical stage sets. He declares that ‘the curious objects that were being constantly brought to light by excavations were not left to moulder in a museum’, but ‘were used as motives for the production of a new art, which was to be not beautiful merely, but also strange’.21 Wilde’s approach to archaeology shapes his criticism of contemporary writing. In ‘The Decay of Lying’, he asserts: ‘The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.’22 He even takes on H. Rider Haggard, who commissioned a fake shard of inscribed pottery as archaeological substantiation for his novel She (1887). He expressly hoped the piece would ‘[get] a rise or two out of the antiquarians’.23 Haggard’s archaeological romances also often feature editorial apparatus crafted by a fictional explorer or archivist of sorts. Wilde laments that though Haggard ‘really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration’—​perhaps gesturing to the archaeological ‘evidence’ fabricated for his tale.24 Wilde’s Vivian yearns for the return of ‘the lost art of Lying’, which will infuse both art and our relationships with the past. ‘[W]‌hen that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of wonder, will return to the land.’25 Characteristically and playfully taking the facets of aestheticism to their limits, Wilde invokes the language of empiricism and offers Romance as its challenger and the champion of ‘wonder’. In what follows, I trace how

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archaeological forgeries invited figures within and outside of professional institutions to contribute to debates over historicism, authenticity, and the historical record, at times echoing Wilde in their thirst for the return of ‘wonder’ to the study of the past.

Expertise and the reading practices of the ‘initiated’ On 7 November 1901, Charles Hercules Read, Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries and Keeper of British Antiquities in the British Museum, wrote a letter to Scottish archaeologist Robert Munro. In the letter, he addresses controversial finds at the Dumbuck crannog in Scotland that Munro had declared fakes. Read mentions an unnamed man who had ‘endeavoured to get [him] on the argument’ and scoffs: ‘A merely literary man cannot understand that to practised people the antiquities are as readable as print and a good deal more accurate.’26 Read’s claim echoes those by various archaeologists and museum curators from the nineteenth century and ever since, suggesting that the true expert possesses almost infallible skills to detect dubious items. His statement also highlights the practice of ‘reading’ antiquities, pointing to processes of analysis and detection that developed in the nineteenth century and were themselves a subject of debate among amateurs and experts. In his Archaeology and False Antiquities (1905), Munro introduces the field of ‘scientific archaeology’, explaining the skills and body of knowledge required by practitioners, and, focusing on examples from prehistoric archaeology—​ a field he laments is sadly underrepresented in Britain—​ continues explain to readers how an archaeologist goes about identifying suspect items. Munro presents the extensive training required to be a real ‘scientific’ archaeologist, working to establish the field as a true discipline, rather than a hobby. Though confident in his theories, he admits that his rules are not failsafe, and shows subtle respect for the people and conditions that challenge his authority. Munro describes the ‘main object of scientific archaeology’ as ‘[t]‌o delineate the various phases of culture and civilisation through which mankind have successively passed during their long career on the globe’.27 He continues to proudly assert the many demanding skills and types of knowledge the scientific archaeologist must possess, from ‘the ordinary synthetical and analytic methods of research’ to ‘knowledge of at least half a dozen foreign languages’ (if one is to study ‘the archaeological phenomena of Western Europe alone’).28 ‘Indeed’, he continues, ‘so wide and diversified is the field to which the archaeological vision must extend that the investigator is constantly obliged to appeal to outside experts to assist in clearing up doubtful points. Before the investigator steps beyond the very threshold of this science he has to master a certain amount of linguistic

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attainments, which take up no inconsiderable amount of time and energy.’29 For Munro, the primary sign of forged objects is their ‘disharmony in the evolutionary sequence which characterises the works of man in all ages’.30 Munro lays out a series of ‘well-​established archaeological generalisations’, and asserts that the rule of chronology for human relics is ‘generally from a simple to a more complex form’.31 Thus, an object’s ‘disharmony’ in an established tune speaks volumes to the connoisseur. Beyond the metaphor of music, Munro turns to often-​mixed metaphors of archives, books, and typography to illustrate the identifiability of ‘spurious specimens’, showing again how the discourses surrounding forgery return constantly to ways of reading an artefact as a text, and Time as a book.32 ‘All past phenomena have been stereotyped in the book of Time, whether they have left in the material world any discernible trail or not. Hence, chronologically and relatively, every single event bears to every other event in an unalterable position, the determination of which is one of the main objects of archaeological science.’33 Using the printmaking term ‘stereotype’, Munro invites associations of replication, casts, and copies.34 Thus, this metaphor, which is meant to emphasise the proficiency of the trained scholar in identifying originality, simultaneously gestures to the opportunities for fabrication and replication proffered by the ‘book of Time’. But the archaeologist too possesses an archive of sorts, according to Munro: ‘When confronted with objects of doubtful authenticity the archaeologist has to pass before the mind’s eye, not only analogous objects found within the same archaeological area, but those from more distant regions which have been at some former period ethnographically associated with that area.’35 The experienced archaeologist holds an archive in his mind. Recalling Vernon Lee’s ‘rubbish-​heaps of the imagination’ and the recent reappraisal of garbage as a culturally valuable archive of material history (discussed in Chapter 1), Munro envisions the archaeologist collecting ‘the waifs and strays of past humanity from the dust-​bin of ages’, comparing them with the pieces in his archive, and ‘determin[ing] approximately their distribution in space and time’.36 The archaeologist is curator, rubbish-​ collector, and book-​maker, sorting the detritus of the past and placing it properly in the book of Time. Munro’s efforts to defend the discipline of archaeology and the expertise of its true practitioners hints at the friction from cultural movements to democratise expertise. Archaeological knowledge at the fin de siècle was diffuse not only across disciplines, but also across socio-​economic strata. Outside of academia, wealthy travellers would gaze firsthand on the treasures of ancient Egypt or Pompeii. These treasures and the methods that uncovered them returned to the British Isles, where dilettante archaeologists avidly perused reports and archaeological narratives. The grand

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effort to educate the public embodied in the enterprise of the Victorian public museum, exposed a wide range of people to archaeological materials, and, as Briefel and Black have explained, ultimately facilitated the propagation of fakes. This cultural movement towards democratising expertise, was, as in the case of Munro, constantly wrapped up in the discourses of reading. In 1874–​76, the Italian physician and art expert Giovanni Morelli published several articles featuring methods of reading the formal qualities of artworks, advocating for a democratisation of connoisseurship that might end the reliance on experts and certificates of authenticity—​a reliance that he believed resulted in the misattribution of many works in Europe’s major collections. According to Briefel, the ‘Morellian method’, as it began to be called, ‘galvanized the sphere of connoisseurship both through its innovative techniques and through what these techniques implied: that art expertise need not be the domain of the select few’.37 Morelli’s ‘new connoisseurship’ shows how not only forgeries themselves, but also the very processes through which art forgeries were exposed, involved subverting the hierarchies and the institutions entrusted with ensuring authenticity. Briefel suggests that the new connoisseurship’s focus on the importance of ‘the detail aligned it with art forms and methods of analysis that had become central to the nineteenth-​century bourgeoisie: the realist novel, the detective story, and the everyday activity of closely reading bodies for markers of identity’.38 Vernon Lee’s archaeologist in Louis Norbert, as I examine in the previous chapter, also brings in the role of detective when discussing archaeology. He refers to the young Italian woman with whom he explores archives as ‘not a poet nor a novelist, but a hereditary antiquarian and born archaeologist, that is to say, considerably of a detective’.39 In their discussions of fakebusting, both Evans and Munro turn to the detective narrative. Evans recalls that ‘the scene of the great dispute as to the authenticity of the Moulin Quignon jaw’, he witnessed an artefact that still ‘retain[ed] upon its surface the finger-​marks of the forger, who had smeared it with the dark-​brown coating of clay. Mr. Francis Galton might perhaps have identified the artist by the finger-​marks.’40 Referring to Galton’s work with fingerprinting, Evans draws connections between archaeological forgery, detective work, and forensic science, anticipating the modern field of forensic archaeology. Alternately, Munro repeatedly invokes the most famous literary detective of the time: Sherlock Holmes. He admits that his methods for identifying fakes will not suit everyone: ‘[L]‌et me not be understood as holding that these rules are so clearly defined that he who runs may read’; that is, not all who know the rules are capable of applying them. ‘On the contrary’, he states, ‘they are but faintly limned in the shadowy past,

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so that to decipher them requires as much technical skill as if they were obscure hieroglyphics.’41 Like the peculiarities of the artefacts themselves, the ‘rules’ for properly locating them in time and space are ‘faintly limned in the shadowy past’. Munro employs an outmoded term for the illumination of manuscripts, insinuating that the authorised examiner of artefacts resembles a reader of history’s faded records. In this convoluted metaphor, the rules for sorting out artefacts rely on a kind of ‘technical skill’ similar to the deciphering of hieroglyphics, a skill also often required by the trained archaeologist. Munro continues: Nor is the necessary skill to be acquired by short cuts. Sherlock Holmes is represented as diagnosing a disease by a mere glance at his patient’s boots; but, were he asked to explain the rationale of his apparently intuitive action, it would take him some time to arrange categorically the congeries of symptoms, experiences, and reasoning processes, on which the diagnosis was actually founded. Even the trivial point which entitled him to discard the ordinary clinical routine was itself, in all probability, the result of years of study. It is precisely the same with the diagnostic utterances of the experienced archaeologist.42

Later in the text, Munro repeats his invocation of the sleuth when discussing the detection of modern forgeries, claiming that ‘One with eyes so trained and long experience is a veritable Sherlock Holmes, whose capability in spotting every abnormal feature is truly astonishing.’43 What may appear an ineffable ability to detect ‘the slightest deviation’ in an archaeological object, like Sherlock Holmes ‘diagnosing a disease by a mere glance at his patient’s boots’, actually derives from ‘years of study’ and a bank of specialist knowledge.44 In other words, what appears to be intuitive is actually highly empirical. Munro’s analogy aligns the detection of archaeological fakes with the scientific empiricism that various scholars of Victorian literature have seen reflected in and shaped by the literary realism that flourished alongside it. In 1905, the well-​known writer Andrew Lang published an extensive response to Munro and Read, who had chastened the ‘mere literary man’ who involved himself in the Dumbuck debate. In The Clyde Mystery: A Study in Forgeries and Folklore, Lang identifies with the ‘mere literary man’, and provides his theory of the dubious finds, as well as a commentary on the arrogance of these archaeologists. He claims: But though ‘merely literary,’ like Mr. —​—​,’ I have spent much time in the study of comparative anthropology; of the manners, ideas, customs, implements, and sacred objects of uncivilised and peasant peoples […] Again, as ‘practised people’ often vary widely in their estimates of antique objects, or objects professing to be antique, I cannot agree with Mr. Read that ‘the antiquities’ are ‘as readable as print,’—​if by ‘antiquities’ he means antiquities in general. At the British Museum I can show Mr. Read several admirable

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specimens of the art of faking, standing, like the Abomination of Desolation, where they ought not. It was not by unpractised persons that they were purchased at the national expense.45

Offering his own studies of ‘comparative anthropology’ as relevant sorts of ‘practise’, Lang calls into question the exclusionary structures to which Read refers. As the subtitle of his work, A Study in Forgeries and Folklore, suggests, Lang incorporates his knowledge of folklore to analyse the controversial artefacts in ‘the Clyde mystery’. Lang also highlights the varying ‘readings’ offered by different experts as evidence of Read’s hubris. In a characteristic joke at the authorities’ expense, Lang notes the ‘admirable specimens of the art of faking’ on display at the British Museum, ‘standing, like the Abomination of Desolation’ as an exhibit to the fallibility of expertise. He goes on to reference other mistakes made by the experts, including the ‘savants of the Louvre’ who ‘were lately caught by the notorious “tiara of Saitaphernes” ’ (to which I return below); also, ‘Dr. A.S. Murray, Keeper of Classical Antiquities in the British Museum, [who] “read” the Mycenaean antiquities erroneously, placing them many centuries too late. M. de Mortillet reckoned them forgeries, and wrote of the discoverer, Dr. Schliemann, and even of Mrs. Schliemann, in a tone unusual in men of science and gentlemen.’ Such people, Lang concludes, ‘have not always found antiquities “as readable as print” ’.46 Referencing some of the most noted archaeological men of his time, Lang cleverly puts paid to Read’s theory, including a sly jab at de Mortillet for his not only inaccurate but also ungentlemanly attack on Schliemann. Lang’s study suggests that Munro’s scepticism about the artefacts stems not only from utter arrogance in his mental archive of artefacts, but also in part from the lack of credentials of the original discoverer, Mr. W.A. Donnelly, who is ‘an artist,—​a painter and designer in black and white,—​ and that, while keenly interested in the pre-​historic or proto-​historic relics of Clydesdale, he makes no claim to be regarded as a trained archaeologist, or widely-​read student’. Donnelly is ‘a field worker in archaeology, rather than an archaeologist of the study and of books’.47 Lang then provocatively compares Donnelly to Heinrich Schliemann, famed excavator of Troy. Lang reminds readers that at the time Schliemann discovered Troy he ‘was no erudite savant, but an enthusiast with an eye for likely sites. Like Dr. Schliemann [Donnelly] discovered certain objects hitherto unknown to Science (at least to Scottish science,) and, like Dr. Schliemann, he has had to take “the consequences of being found in such a situation.” ’48 That is, facing initial and unjust doubt because of his lack of official credentials. Lang likewise suggests that professional men may declare the authenticity or inauthenticity of items simply to save face. He notes that Munro ‘does not dispute the genuine character of many strange figurines in flint, from Volósova, though

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the redoubtable M. de Mortillet denounced them as forgeries; they had the misfortune to corroborate other Italian finds against which M. de Mortillet had a grudge’.49 Playfully claiming that archaeologists might develop professional grudges with artefacts, Lang suggests the entire system of authentication could be toppled domino-​style by an obstinate professional. Near the centre of his book, Lang offers a type of reading that resembles Lady Venetia’s vision of Louis Norbert’s birth (discussed in my Chapter 2) more closely than it does the scientific reading of professional men, or even the rest of his chapters. In a chapter entitled ‘The Last Day at Old Dumbuck’—​provocatively suggesting ties to Edward Bulwer-​Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834)—​Lang offers a creative vision of the inhabitants of the Clyde, built from its fragmentary remains and supported with some dating by Bede. ‘Suppose the sites were occupied by the waters of the ford’, he begins. ‘There our friends lived, and probably tattooed themselves.’50 Calling them ‘our friends’, Lang emphasises transhistorical connections and friendships that he imagines archaeologists often forget in their empirical ambition. He sees the inhabitants evacuating, ‘leav[ing] behind only the canoe, the deer horns, stone-​polishers, sharpened bones, the lower stone of a quern, and the now obsolete, or purely folk-​loreish stone “amulets,” or “pendants,” and the figurines’.51 These are the items discovered by modern archaeologists, while Lang imagines the inhabitants taking with them ‘their more valuable property, their Early Iron axes and knives’, as well as ‘amber beads’, ‘down to the minutest fragment of ­pottery’—​­addressing why archaeologists found none of these items. Or, he ponders, perhaps they were conquered and looted by the Scots and taken away into captivity. ‘The tears come to my eyes’, he writes, ‘as I think of the Last Day of Old Dumbuck, for, take it as you will, there was a last day of Dumbuck, as of windy Ilios, and of “Carthage left deserted of the sea.” So ends my little idyllic interlude, and, if I am wrong, blame Venerable Bede!’52 In this fanciful section, Lang fills the gaps in the historical narrative that empiricism cannot offer, drawing from archaeological legends of Troy and Carthage in his romantic vision. Ultimately, Lang’s argument across 140 pages is that we ought to ‘suspend judgement’ on the artefacts in question, to ‘file the objects for reference, and await the results of future excavations’.53 He claims: ‘I prefer, unlike Dr. Munro in this case, to extend the archaeological gaze beyond the limits of things already known to occur in the Scottish area which—​by the way—​must contain many relics still unknown.’54 He asserts suspicion ‘of the tendency to shout “Forgery” in the face of everything unfamiliar’.55 At times, Munro’s scepticism seems almost paranoid in Lang’s presentation. Lang excerpts large portions of Munro’s book, including an extended passage in which Munro speculates on certain fragments of decorated stones

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found at Dunbuie. The fragments do not fit together to create a whole piece. This invites Munro to ponder two possibilities: that the stones are genuinely ancient, and simply broke into fragments over time, or that they were completed as fragments from the beginning. However, he dismisses the first possibility because, ‘in the breaking up of such tablets, it would be inconceivable, according to the law of chances, that one portion, and only one, of each different specimen would remain while all the others has disappeared’. The second possibility, ‘the hypothesis that the occupiers of the fort carved these designs on the rough and unprepared splinters of stone in the precise manner they now come before us’, he claims, ‘seems to me to involve premeditated deception, for it is difficult to believe that such uncompleted designs could have any other finality of purpose’.56 Munro appears entirely sceptical, and seemingly on the defence against being tricked. In his response, Lang emphasises the need to ‘extend the archaeological gaze’ not only forward, but backward, considering that late-​Victorian men might not have been the first to encounter these finds. ‘Is it really contrary to “the laws of chances” that, in some 1200 years of unknown fortunes, no two fragments of the same plates of red sandstone (some dozen in number) should be found at Dunbuie?’57 He then looks outward from Scotland to the wider range of archaeological fragments in the archive of time: ‘Where are the arms of the Venus of Milo, vainly sought beside and around the rest of the statue? Where are the lost noses, arms, and legs of thousands of statues? Nobody can guess where they are or how they vanished.’58 Citing some of the most famous and beautiful art related to archaeological discovery, Lang suggests that Munro’s scepticism might ultimately deprive archaeological studies of genuine, important, and stunning artefacts. And yet, despite his seeming empirical staunchness, Munro’s endeavour to foreground archaeology’s objectivity often contradicts itself in ways that reflect the very paradoxes that Lang points out, and which characterise theories of literary realism. Beside the narrative unearthed by Briefel—​that of amateurs trained by realist novels, detective fiction, and the ‘Morellian Method’ to read art objects objectively and empirically to detect fakes—​I trace another narrative in the writing of archaeologists, in which the experts so emphatic about their empirical methods cross a sort of threshold, walking empiricism to its limit and wandering into claims of almost-​magical intuition, initiation, and the aesthetic impression. For example, in ‘The Forgery of Antiquities’, which Munro excerpts at length, Evans addresses the desperation collectors must feel regarding the profusion of fakes, and reassures these collectors: ‘By those long versed in any particular branch of archaeology a kind of intuitive perception is gained which enables them almost at a glance to distinguish between the true and the false.’59 Though this passage maintains that what appears as intuitive

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perception is merely the result of years of study, Evans suggests more in that ‘glance’ than quick thinking. Indeed, the reading skills of those Charles Read refers to as ‘practised people’ often moved beyond the empirical and into the preternatural. In his 1912 monograph Forged Egyptian Antiquities, T.G. Wakeling claims, ‘Most excavators […] have a sense of intuition which tells them it a thing is false or not. Not that they depend in any way upon this, for they weigh up the evidence in a strictly scientific manner.’60 Backtracking to reassure the reader that the real archaeologist relies on weighing evidence rather than on his ‘sense of intuition’, Wakeling still brings in that ‘intuition’ which Munro, Evans, and others find essential to the detection of fakes. Empirical analysis relies on the information of the senses, through which we register experience, and for Wakeling, all the senses—​including that of scent—​may be counted on to root out forgeries. Declaring that forgers were often fascinated by his abilities to detect fakes, he tells the story of an Egyptian man who brought him a fabricated wooden statuette of a figure in a boat. Wakeling detected the item’s spuriousness by its smell. Quite simply, he explains, ‘[T]‌he smell of wood of which the figures were made was new, not old.’ Referring to himself in the third person, Wakeling tells the man, ‘If he does not see that which is false with his eyes, he smells it with his nose.’61 Wakeling’s claims present the artefactual encounter as deeply sensual, suggesting that studied familiarity with the artefacts of the past both creates, and often yields to, more innate methods of recognition. Occasionally, archaeologists at the fin de siècle use the language of initiation and ritual to describe their inclusion in the rather exclusive fakebusting club. Evans claims, ‘As dogs must pass through their distemper, so an antiquary must have bought his forgeries before he can be regarded as thoroughly seasoned.’62 Getting fooled by a forger, in Evans’s perspective, is a necessary rite of passage. With more humility than Munro, Evans admits, ‘Some, like myself, have not just purchased forgeries, but have published accounts of them as if they had been genuine antiquities—​accounts which any amount of subsequent withdrawal fails to annihilate.’63 Fakes are so prolific that certainly ‘few, if any […] can honestly say that they have never been duped’.64 Munro takes the discourse of initiation in another direction, though. He asserts that while artefacts have no labels, they feature ‘certain marks or symbols, unconsciously impressed on them by their original owners or manufacturers […] which become legible in the hands of the initiated’.65 Gifted archaeologists are imagined as members of an exclusive group, those who have been initiated into the secrets of discernment. Even applying the language of quasi-​religious ritual, Munro presents the secrets of the artefact as a code for which only a select few hold the cypher. Even today, fakebusters like Hoving claim there are ‘connoisseurs, who have the singular ability—​call it a sixth or seventh sense—​to detect a forgery

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instantaneously in almost every field’.66 He explains that great busters, ‘describe the feelings as a pull in the gut or a warning cry from a voice deep inside them. The talent cannot be studied and applied. It is nurtured and refined only by saturation.’67 Significantly, Hoving asserts that those most attuned to the authenticity of an object are ‘primarily not book scholars and certainly not theoreticians’, suggesting that the ability to uncover duplicity is a more innate than academic skill, though it does require the privilege of situation—​the person must have seen a lot of art. He relates the experience of fakebusters he’s interviewed, who ‘all describe a kind of mental rush, a flurry of visual facts flooding their minds when looking at a work of art’, citing one who ‘described the experience as if his eyes and senses were a flock of hummingbirds popping in and out of dozens of way stations’.68 To describe the encounter with the artefact, highlighting these bursts of synaesthetic experience, demands experimental language seemingly far from the empirical, objective analysis of Sherlock Holmes. Hoving (or the fakebuster he cites) sounds more like a symbolist poet. Describing his own process of fakebusting, Hoving claims, ‘It’s automatic’: ‘Sometimes I think I’m hearing someone talking to me, making an inventory of the expected artistic episodes and emphasising the unexpected or inexplicable. When I describe to myself a work I begin to suspect is a fake, I find myself sometimes using obscene language.’69 Calling upon his ‘inventory of the expected artistic episodes’ like the archive Munro says must ‘pass before the mind’s eye’, Hoving claims that an encounter with a fake art-​object transforms, at an almost-​ unconscious level, the very language he uses as he speaks to himself, driving it towards the obscene. His description suggests a phenomenon in which the inherent indecency of the fabricated artefact vulgarises his own inner dialogue. Again, as empirical methods come full circle to first impressions, language itself is transformed. ‘Seasoned fakebusters’, Hoving asserts, ‘know that first impressions are almost always right.’70 Invoking the ‘impression’, Hoving invites us to consider his work in relation to the late-​Victorian Aestheticism that helped make art criticism what it is today. In his famous conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), the tenets of which inspired later aesthetes like Wilde, John Addington Symonds, and Vernon Lee, Walter Pater explores the nature of an experience and the impression of that experience: At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects […] But when reflection begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force is suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—​, colour, odour, texture,—​in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable, flickering,

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inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind.71

Celebrating the ephemeral impressions of ‘colour, odour, texture’, Pater presents an epistemology that rejects ‘the solidity with which language invests’ objects, arguing further in the conclusion that ‘With this sense of the splendor of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.’72 The sensual experience of the artistic impression obviates and perhaps invalidates the need to theorise about art. In his evocative claims about experience of fakebusting, Hoving and the best busters resemble one of Pater’s archaeological models, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who, according to Pater, ‘apprehended the subtlest principles of the Hellenic manner not through the understanding, but by instinct or touch’.73 The scientific modes of archaeological reading that develop across the forty-​or-​so years covered in this book are often akin to the mode of literary realism which developed throughout the nineteenth century. However, at the same time, and into the present, aesthetes, archaeologists, and curators ponder ways of reading aesthetic objects that seem grounded more firmly in the art criticism of Pater, modes of reading that are impressionistic and instinctive. In Realism, Ethics, and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (2008), George Levine embraces the mode of realism, scanning its odd development and inherent paradoxes. He explains, The more strenuously empiricism pushes against an epistemology that makes ideas more real than matter, that insists on (divinely) inherited knowledge, that gives first place to intuition and imagination, the more clear it becomes that realism always, more or less surreptitiously, still depends on the mind as much as on ‘external nature.’ Perhaps ironically, therefore, realism has always tended to contain (in both senses of the word) idealism of some form or other, threatening to slide into what emerged in its late nineteenth-​century manifestations as an almost absolute solipsism, Pater’s thick wall of personality through which no real voice ever pierces.74

Levine’s tracing of empiricism as it ‘slide[s]‌ ’ eventually into a more Paterian mode of reading helps to illuminate the strange slippage between objectivity/​ realism and impressionism fin-​de-​siècle archaeologists (and contemporary art experts like Hoving) weave into their descriptions of fakebusting. The process of distinguishing archaeological authenticity foregrounds where, for many writers, the empirical comes full circle back to the aesthetic impression.

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Forgers, fakers, and ‘illiterate mud-​rakers’ In ‘The Forgery of Antiquities’, Evans recalls the story of what became known as the Billy and Charley Forgeries, or the Shadwell Forgeries, an odd collection of lead, pewter, and lead-​alloy objects allegedly discovered during the construction of Shadwell Dock. Evans explains, There were crowned monarchs in ecclesiastical vestments, knights in various kinds of armour, archbishops, bishops, and priests with mitres, croziers, and different emblems, incense-​cups, patens, ewers, reliquaries, and vessels of all shapes, besides numerous medallions and plaques with loops for suspension. The great variety of form and the strangeness of some of the devices seemed to raise a presumption that such a fertility of imagination and such dexterity of workmanship could hardly be possessed by any single forger, and therefore that, though exceptional, these objects were to be accepted as genuine.75

When, in 1858, a London antiquities dealer brought the Athenaeum to trial for libel because it had claimed several items in his collection were forged, Charles Roach Smith, a noted archaeologist, testified to the authenticity of these pieces. Roach Smith even published an article three years later claiming the artefacts dated to the reign of Queen Mary and had been brought to England to replace items damaged during the Reformation.76 In response to this article, Charles Read conducted an investigation and discovered, in the words of Evans, ‘that the whole fraud was perpetrated by a couple of illiterate mud-​rakers’, William (Billy) Smith and Charles (Charley) Eaton.77 Such scandals demonstrate that ‘mere literary men’ and ‘illiterate mud-​rakers’ had skin in the game of archaeological forgery, and at times held such impressive skills and extensive knowledge that they could bring professionals and lauded institutions to their knees. Though the archaeologists and art critics discussed in this chapter’s first section regularly assign almost superhuman detection skills to archaeologists, discussions of archaeological forgeries at the fin de siècle just as often ascribe a sort of preternatural skill to the forger himself.78 In texts by archaeologists including Munro and Evans, as well as works by those outside of academic institutions, we see archaeological forgers ascribed a unique natural gift, an intuition, or remarkable creative abilities which paradoxically align them with the very scientists and archaeologists responsible for studying authentic artefacts. In the 1840s, a wandering forger known as Flint Jack (though actually named Edward Simpson) became a familiar character to dealers in artefacts, museum curators, and scientists in the midlands and northern counties. He had other names, such as ‘Fossil Willy’, ‘Old Antiquarian’, ‘Cockney Bill’, ‘Bones’, and ‘Shirtless’. Joseph Stevens, an honorary curator of the Reading Museum, begins his discussion of Flint Jack in 1894, after Flint Jack’s death,

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with the claim: ‘That truth is stranger than fiction we have frequent verifications.’79 Stevens suggests that the true story of this forger is stranger than some fiction, though what particular fiction is unclear. He seems perhaps simply to enjoy the playful paradox of truth and fiction in the telling of a forger’s life. Flint Jack, according to Stevens, ‘possessed ability, and a kind of genius which would have enabled him to obtain a comfortable subsistence, if not a respectable scientific position, had he taken half the pains to be honest that it took him to be dishonest’.80 He adds, ‘He was at his best something more than a mere forger.’81 After first earning money by selling authentic Neolithic flint implements, he began visiting local collections, ‘avail[ing] himself of the opportunities which presented themselves of visiting public and private collections, in order to observe the forms of urns, heads, seals, and other relics’, to discern what other kinds of artefacts might appeal to purchasers and how they were constructed.82 He manufactured countless flints, a Roman milestone, and even an ‘ancient’ Roman breastplate he fabricated from a tea tray—​an artefact which in 1905 Munro believed was still on display in a collection in Scarborough.83 In January 1862, Flint Jack was invited to perform his craftsmanship at a meeting of the Geologists’ Association in Cavendish Square. After a paper discussing ancient flint objects and the ‘modern fabrications of similar specimens’, Jack ascended the platform before the room of geologists, and opened a handkerchief full of flint fragments: He turned them over and selected a small piece, which he held, sometimes on his knee and sometimes in the palm of his hand, and gave it a few careless blows with what looked like a crooked nail. In a few minutes he had produced a small arrow-​head, which he handed to a gentleman near, and went on fabricating another with a facility and rapidity which proved long practice. Soon a crowd collected around the forger, while his fragments were fast converted into different varieties of arrow-​heads, and exchanged for sixpences among the audience.84.

With just a crooked nail, ‘Shirtless’ fashioned authentic-​looking implements for the admiration of his scientific audience. Briefel examines Flint Jack as a sort of Smilesian hero, a self-​made man who diligently studied his craft and earned success, and eventually fame. She references an 1867 article about in All the Year Round, in which his eventual breakthrough in the quest to forge well is described as a ‘Eureka!’ moment. ‘His self-​instruction’, claims Briefel, ‘allows for the cultivation that is an essential part of the forger’s identity.’85 Due to his particular genius, and the well-​practised skill of a craftsman, Flint Jack thus earned a level of celebrity, and a strange rapport with the very researchers his work threatened to discredit. In addition to resembling the Smilesian figure, who finds a way to flourish in a challenging

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economic system, Flint Jack’s success in the realm of archaeological craftsmanship suggests a type of agency over the historical record and power in the elitist institution that seeks to read it. Another forger renowned for intuitive skill was Louis Marcy, whose innovation as an artist and intuition as a subversive agent are parallelled. Marcy lived in London from 1888 to 1903, growing acquainted with curators at the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum. Marcy crafted medieval ecclesiastical ornaments, including, for example, a crosier (a bishop’s staff) sold to the V&A and a holy water bucket sold to the British Museum. He was arrested in Paris in 1903 for anarchism and imprisoned for five months. While imprisoned, authorities searched his home. While they found no explosives, they found around two million francs’ worth of antiquities.86 These included many medieval church ornaments—​ in Hoving’s tongue-​ in-​cheek words, ‘dozens upon dozens of beautiful medieval church implements and objects of decorative arts, all obviously centuries old from their knocks and bruises’.87 The officials assumed Marcy was a thief, but never managed to track down the owners of the ‘missing pieces’. After his release from prison, he edited and wrote for a magazine in Paris from 1907 to 1914 called Le Connaisseur: Revue critique des arts et curiosités, which argued against ‘capitalist art collectors, dealers, and art forgers’—​a true master of deceit.88 Jones suggests that Marcy was a remarkable salesman with a penchant for understanding the market. He cites a rising demand for Spanish church items after Charles Read published a report on an exhibition in Madrid in 1893. Marcy’s pieces, he claims seem like they were fabricated to appeal to wealthy patrons. His success, claims Jones, ‘lies with the skilled craftsmanship of his material, and the inspired eclecticism of his designs, none of them direct imitations, many clever transpositions from one material to another –​ivory to metal, manuscripts to enamel’.89 Hoving recounts Marcy’s exploits and claims: ‘Marcy’s work is superior. He was something of a genius when it came to fabricating patinas. He created a startling new universe of authentic-​looking scratches, wears and tears and damages. He never made the mistake of directly copying a casket, holy-​water bucket, purse, or lectern from an existing example.’90 Hoving envisions Marcy’s intentional application of apparently accidental wear and tear as an aesthetic innovation of enormous import. Marcy’s genius, according to Hoving, derives in part from his skill walking the line between the recognisable and the unique. In The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, Hillel Schwartz explains: ‘Whether a daring inventor or a living anachronism, the forger is a master of the déjà vu, producing what the archeologist or historian is already looking for, artefacts or documents quite familiar and a little strange. The familiarity makes the work meaningful, the strangeness makes it valuable.’91 Schwartz’s discussion of forgers recalls Wilde’s ‘The

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Truth of Masks’, in which Wilde praises the Shakespearean stage for its use of archaeology in recreating historical stage sets. The ‘curious’ objects uncovered in archaeological excavation, were for them not ‘left to moulder in a museum’, but ‘were used as motives for the production of a new art, which was to be not beautiful merely, but also strange’.92 Indeed, Wilde’s suggestion here is that archaeology’s best purpose is not to uncover genuine artefacts for collections, but to inspire artworks beautifully familiar and surprisingly strange. Marcy’s impressive balancing of familiarity and strangeness makes him, according to Hoving, ‘one of the most dangerous type of forgers’. Hoving continues, ‘[Marcy] “intuited” the style of the past and delivered it exuberantly.’93 Again, the Victorian forger is credited with a superior intuition, a singular connection with the past that allows him to craft seemingly authentic and also aesthetically innovative artefacts. Lang also assigns the forger incredible cleverness in The Clyde Mystery, though his vision of the forger operates as a joke to demonstrate the silliness of Munro’s extreme scepticism. Indeed, Lang’s vision of the forger offers some of the text’s most humorous material. Lang’s extensive discussion of the Clyde mystery relies on a comparative approach, drawing connections between the questionable artefacts in Scotland and similar artefacts found across the world. He declares that if his use of the ‘comparative method’ succeeds, ‘one point will be made probable. Either the Clyde objects are old, or the modern maker knew much more of archaeology than many of his critics and used his knowledge to direct his manufacture of spurious things; or he kept coinciding accidentally with genuine relics of which he knew nothing.’94 To craft these objects that resemble others across the world, but differ from local finds in Scotland, Lang imagines a forger with immense knowledge of the discipline from which he remains excluded. ‘My suggestion is that, if the Clyde objects are forged, the forger knew a good deal of archaeology—​ knew that perforated inscribed plaques of soft mineral occurred in many countries—​but he did not slavishly imitate the patterns.’ He continues to reference a recent article from the Canadian Annual Archaeological Report in 1904, stating, ‘The forger may have been guided by the ancient Canadian pendants; that man knows everything!’95 Later in the text, considering several carved figurines found at Dumbuck and Langbank, which resemble those ‘found in many sites from Japan to Troy, from Russia to the Lake Dwellings of Europe, and I West Africa’, Lang states that if the Clyde figurines are forged, ‘[t]‌he astute forger, knowing that figurines were found in Japanese kitchen middens, knowing it before Y. Koganei published the fact in 1903, thought the Dumbuck kitchen midden an appropriate place for a figurine. Dr. Munro, possibly less well-​informed, regards the bottom of a kitchen midden at Dumbuck as “a strange resting place for a goddess.” ’96 Though used to comically demonstrate the problems with Munro’s extreme

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scepticism and disciplinary arrogance, Lang’s imaginary forger figure also highlights the democratisation of knowledge taking place across the turn of the century. Just as Lang has clearly done, readers could actually access texts by archaeologists across the world, and could build their own mental archives that might empower them to challenge the ideas of experts. If ‘a mere literary man’ can access and deploy such discourse, why not someone with less noble motives? In his conclusion to the book, Lang declares himself ‘the forger’s only friend’. ‘If there be a faker, I hope he appreciates my sympathetic estimate of his knowledge, assiduity, and skill in leger de main.’ He asks the forger to ‘come forward and make a clean breast of it, like the young men who hoaxed the Society for Psychical Research with a faked wraith, or phantasm of the living’.97 Paralleling the scientific study of archaeology with the Society for Psychical Research, of which he became President in 1911, Lang compares the study of historical fragments with the study of paranormal phenomena, calling perhaps for some humility among archaeological professionals, and even the ability to laugh at themselves. One of the most famous targets of criticism for professional arrogance was, in Lang’s words, ‘the savants of the Louvre’.98 In 1896, the Louvre acquired a spectacular artefact known as the Tiara of Saitaphernes, believed to date to the late third century or early second century BCE, to the Scythian peoples, a nomadic group north of the Black Sea. Several discoveries of spectacular Scythian artefacts in the 1870s and 1880s propelled a desperate desire on the part of collectors and museums to acquire these treasures. But none were displayed in Europe. However, in 1896, the gold crown was brought by antiquities agents to the Louvre, where it was scrutinised for authenticity. Despite some lingering questions about the artefact, Heron de Villefosse, the curator of the department of Greek and Roman art, was compelled to make a move. The dealers urged him to hurry, citing other institutions interested in the find. Though he thought of turning to other authorities for advice, such as Adolf Furtwängler in Munich, Hoving offers an imaginative retelling of Villefosse’s response: But no. He was German, after all. What about someone at the Hermitage? One of the Russians who had excavated Scythian objects? No again. The Russians might do something rash, perhaps even make a claim for it.99

Hoving continues: ‘Villefosse, blinded by his desire to acquire the rarest of the rare, approved the purchase.’100 The tiara was finally purchased for 200,000 francs. In his clever retelling, Hoving suggests one of the more interesting realities of the relationships between forgers and fakebusters at the turn of the twentieth century (and perhaps today): their motives are

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often shockingly similar. In an article published in the journal L’Homme in 1885, Gabriel de Mortillet offers a list of the six motives behind forgery. The first, which he claims is the most common, ‘is the desire of gain’; The second—​self-​conceit (l’amour propre): to discover and possess that which no other person has discovered or possesses, and above all to publish a sensational report. The third—​a foolish national pride, which leads one to find in his own country everything that has been found elsewhere, and even something more. The fourth—​philosophical and religious prejudices, which, fearing the light of truth, lead one to oppose certain studies by exposing them to ridicule. The fifth—​jealousy (la vendetta) of some person whose reputation an opponent wishes to undermine.101

Hoving’s implication that Villefosse refused to seek advice out of a sense of national and professional jealousy, and a desire to keep the tiara in Paris, checks off at least three of the above motives. Thus, just as fin-​de-​siècle archaeologists assigned both themselves and successful forgers remarkable intuition or genius, the tales of fin-​de-​siècle fakes reveal the extensiveness of the similarities between the opposed groups. It is not only contemporary experts who critique the pride that prompted the Louvre’s expensive mistake. Even contemporary journalists interpreted the motives behind Villefosse’s decision as nationalistic and jealous. A writer for the Toronto Saturday Night covered the story in 1903. ‘[E]‌minent archaeologists vouched for the authenticity of the antiques, declared to have been dug out near Odessa, on territory having belonged to the old kingdom of Pontus, and friends of the Museum advanced the purchase money. Thus there was no fear that the precious tiara might adorn the galleries of the British Museum, and remain as a reminder of a new victory of England over France.’102 Shortly after its first exhibition, accusations of forgery began to fly, and continued circulating for years, the Louvre desperately standing by the artefact’s authenticity. Even when the tiara’s forger—​Israel Rouchomovsky—​ came forward, investigators remained committed to the artefact’s legitimacy. Rouchomovsky presented the books from which he obtained models for his figures (images from Renaissance works only slightly altered), explained the soldering of the piece, and created multiple similar pieces for them, and yet they still were not convinced. It was only when Rouchomovsky revealed the intentional damage he had done to the object to create the illusion of time’s wear and tear, that they admitted defeat. Rouchomovsky had damaged the piece only on the flatter, less ornamented parts of the object, rather than on the raised design, a too-​artificial process for an object that would have

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undergone 2500 years of damage.103 The Tiara of Saitaphernes illustrates how museums’ desire to possess that which nobody else possesses fuelled the success of forgers across the world. Briefel uses the example of the tiara, the fin-​de-​siècle debate over which she traces ‘beyond the parameters of the art world’, to show that ‘[f]‌aking was, in fact, crucial to asserting the cultural authority of nations’.104 Before Rouchomovsky had been proven the tiara’s creator, another man named Elina Mayence had come forward claiming to be its forger. The writer at the Toronto Saturday Night explains that Mayence ‘lived in Montmartre, and claimed that the famous Butte, made illustrious as the home of the Parisian “Chansonniers,” had also the glory of having been the birthplace of the much-​talked-​of tiara’.105 Briefel suggests that Mayence had hoped to achieve the kind of fame earned by Flint Jack, since, ‘He belonged to a culture in which a forger could become a celebrity.’106 Beyond Mayence’s possible desire for fame, which highlights the extent to which fakery pervaded not just academic but popular culture, ‘the famous Butte’ from which he emerged suggests another rich connection between late-​Victorian forgery fiascos and emerging conceptions of modern art. Montmartre, known in the art community as the birthplace of modern art, was home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to figures like Henri Matisse, André Derain, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Gertrude Stein, and more artists across a range of media. A page in a September 1905 issue of The Sketch features a spread of seven images taken in a workshop in Montmartre. The title of the piece is ‘Bogus Antiquities: The Manufacture of Sham Works of Art’, and the images include ‘the manufacture of a bogus mummy’, ‘making spurious antique statuettes’, and ‘finishing a false primitive of the Virgin’, among others. The writer cites the recent debacle of the tiara, and explains that since then, ‘hardly a week has passed that some museum or collection has not discovered that something it valued was worthless’. The writer tells the story of a ‘distinguished collector’ who found a painting at the Petit Palais that was exactly like one he owned, and ‘fearing for the authenticity of his own picture, he caused inquiry to be made’, ultimately discovering ‘that all the paintings in the exhibition were forgeries’. ‘Further investigation’, the writer continues, ‘has revealed the existence in Paris of a tremendous traffic in the forging of works of art. It has its centre in Montmartre, the headquarters of a humorous rascality. The work is carried out with all the artistic address that we associate with the delightful villains who congregate round the virginal white dome of the Sacré Cœur.’ Rather than sounding scandalised or even indignant on behalf of the poor ‘distinguished collector’, the writer seems thoroughly entertained by the humorous rascals and ‘delightful villains’ who craft the ‘bogus antiquities’. The artists in the images appear diligent in their white smocks, hard at work.

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Figure 3.1  ‘Bogus Antiquities: The Manufacture of Sham Works of Art’, The Sketch, Wednesday 20 September, 1905, p. 376.

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The writer’s barely concealed glee suggests one of the final supposed motives for forgers, according to de Mortillet: ‘Lastly—​what may be called the love of mystification (l’amour de la fumisterie), the mere pleasure of playing a mischievous joke.’107 If forgers enjoy fooling others, perhaps sometimes others enjoy the mischief too, especially, for writers, when it opens such enticing possibilities for clever wordplay and stylish prose.

Artefact | artifact, n. and adj. The word ‘artefact’ derives from the Latin arte, ars, factum, facere. It can refer to ‘an object made or modified by human workmanship, as opposed to one formed by natural processes’; or, in archaeology, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it can refer to ‘an excavated object that shows characteristic signs of human workmanship or use’. In science, though, which the OED distinguishes from archaeology, an artefact can be ‘a spurious result, effect, or finding in a scientific experiment or investigation, esp. one created by the experimental technique or procedure itself’.108 In the very word artefact, connotations (even denotations) of artifice, construction, and fact converge. Both art and evidence, both of the past and in the present, artefacts provide unstable ground for signification—​an instability that opens up countless avenues for imaginative exploration and figurative wordplay.109 Just as the language of artefacts provides a slippery surface, writers at the turn of the twentieth century began to recognise the very nature of the boundary between authentic and inauthentic, when it comes to archaeological study, as far blurrier than it might at first appear. The word ‘forge’ is even more fraught. A transitive verb that can mean ‘to make, fashion, frame, or construct (any material thing)’, forge can also mean ‘to shape by heating in a forge and hammering’, ‘to fabricate, frame, invent (a false or imaginary story, lie, etc.); to devise (evil)’; ‘to make (something) in fraudulent imitation of something else; to make or devise (something spurious) in order to pass it off as genuine’.110 Just as in ‘artefact’, authenticity and artistry shake hands in the fires of the ‘forge’. Truly, the playfulness of figurative language pervades archaeological discourse and the discourse of forgery, reflecting the uneasy relationships among artefacts and their categories. Evans, for example, refers to ‘spurious Palissy ware’ (ceramics made to imitate the work of sixteenth-​ century French potter Bernard Palissy) as ‘almost a drug on the market’; Lang calls his imaginary forger ‘the Curse’; and in comparing archaeological analysis to Sherlock Holmes ‘diagnosing a disease’, Munro aligns fakery with physical illness.111 In his 1893 essay, Evans distinguishes between ‘forge’ and ‘­counterfeit’, which he claims are often considered synonymous.

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‘Counterfeits (contrafacta) are made in imitation of genuine objects; forgeries (fabricata) are not of necessity imitations, but may embody entirely new conceptions, though outwardly seeming to be ancient.’112 But, these neat categories give way quickly when the realities of dynamic material culture exert themselves. For example, many wooden figurines discovered by Giovanni Batista Belzoni in the Valley of the Kings in 1817—​full of old wood smells, I imagine Wakefield would say—​were broken. Belzoni’s patron, Henry Salt, chose to restore the pieces by seizing pieces of other artefacts and creating pedestals or supports, thus mixing genuine artefacts from different time periods to create odd new hybrids. This process is curiously called ‘cannibalising’, taking often ‘what were regarded as inferior artefacts to enhance the value of more desirable pieces’.113 Such breakdowns and reconfigurations of value continued throughout the nineteenth century. For instance, Evans notes that ‘[f]‌ictitious inscriptions are still occasionally scratched on genuine Roman sepulchral urns, and I have known a Roman tile to have its interest and value enhanced by having cut upon it what appeared to be the impression of a Legionary stamp’.114 Modern modifications of genuinely ancient objects challenge conventional heuristics of value. Evans notes that the number of impressive counterfeited gems created in the first half of the nineteenth century reached such a peak that they ‘reacted on the value of genuine antique gems, so that it became considerably reduced’.115 In this case, fakers actually transformed the market. Modern and ancient are often combined, explains Evans, as when ‘modern intaglios are mounted in ancient settings as a means of averting suspicion from them’.116 Additionally, ‘Not only are imitations of ancient vases produced in a greater or less degree of perfection, but alterations are effected in genuine specimens which entirely change their character and apparent value.’117 He turns to a Dr Birch whose ‘History of Ancient Pottery’ offers various evidences of what has been done to Greek vases. Evans refers to ‘[t]he making good of defective parts with fragments of other vases’ as ‘a common and venial offence’ while declaring that ‘the painting modern figures on the vases is carrying deception too far’.118 Examples of such strange hybrid pieces, causing all kinds of trouble to the criteria of value, abound. The famous Tanagra figurines entered the market near the end of the nineteenth century, when thousands of graves in cemeteries in central Greece, particularly the ancient town of Tanagra, and Asia Minor, were looted. These statues dated from the sixth century to the first century BC, but those dating from the third to second centuries BC—​draped female figures, the most Hellenistic aesthetic of the bunch—​became known as Tanagras and inspired a craze across Europe and America.119 A London correspondent for the Leeds Mercury in 1900 refers to a recent ‘commotion […] caused by the discovery that several spurious Tanagra terra-​cotta figures have been

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sold in London recently for large sums’. Sounding quite unsurprised, the writer references ‘a factory in Athens’ that ‘produced statuettes so closely resembling the originals discovered in 1873 at Tanagra that they deceived the most expert art critics’. The writer claims, ‘Genuine Tanagra figures are now very rare. The greater number belong to the second half of the fourth century B.C., and represent not deities or heroic personages, but the homely, everyday life of the Greeks treated with great simplicity and evident realism.’120 The writer’s implicit warning against figurines representing deities rather than ‘homely, everyday life’, and their invocation of the term ‘realism’ point to the broader connections this chapter has drawn between aesthetic debates and archaeological forgery. Late-​Victorian art collectors, inspired by the aesthetic movement, desired beautiful, draped Hellenic figures, icons that resembled and inspired late-​Victorian dress reform. Debbie Challis references the semi-​recent exhibit at the V&A entitled The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1869–​1900, which ‘illustrated the influence of Greek clothing on contemporary art and dress reform through the display of two ‘Tanagra” terracotta figurines, on loan from the British Museum, as part of the section on “Grecian Ideals” ’.121 But the writer for the Leeds Mercury warns of forgers supplying the very demand for a specific aesthetic. Additionally, though the tiny Tanagra figurines were generally damaged over time and unearthed with broken feet or hands, Victorians preferred their Tanagras to be complete. When demand outpaced supply, David Bailey explains that ‘pastiches made up of ancient but alien fragments were sold as alien pieces’.122 Hoving claims, ‘The fact that nineteenth-​ century Tanagras are all complete right down to the fingertips, despite being badly crunched, is a sure sign of their real nature.’123 Virginia Zimmerman argues that in the nineteenth century, ‘[S]‌cientists fashioned narratives out of fragmented remains. The evidence they excavated revealed at once the extraordinary depth of time and the awesome ability of the writer to measure time and to craft its story.’124 If the archaeologist’s task is to reconstruct fragments into cohesive narratives, Tanagra forgers did something similar, though illicit. They took fragmented materials from the past, reconstructed and supplemented them to create more cohesive wholes. Now, according to Hoving, ‘top-​quality Tanagra fakes are highly valued, sometimes more than real Greek pieces of the fourth or third centuries’, pointing to the lasting transformations Victorian forgers have had on not only the historical record, but also the market for its treasures.125 Ultimately, one of the greatest ironies of archaeological forgery is that eventually, all fakes become genuinely historical—​ legitimate artefacts from the era of their creation. A writer for the Derby Mercury in 1880 reminds us, ‘The taste for what is old is no new passion. It existed among the ancients.’126 Hoving notes, ‘In their three-​ thousand-​ year history of

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producing art, the ancient Egyptians probably produced more fakes than all the modern fakers combined.’127 In fact, technicians analysing the jewellery in Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1976, the majority of which is seemingly precious and semiprecious stones, discovered that the pieces are legitimately ancient, but also made of glass. While researchers panicked momentarily about a recent con-​artist, they found in Carter’s notes that he called the stones glass as well. Hoving speculates, ‘Had ancient fakers tricked King Tut?’128 Forgeries invite not only archaeologists but also those of us in other disciplines, such as history, literary studies, and gender studies to recognise the historical record as dynamic, seeing artefacts not as static icons of a particular place and time, but perpetually creating new meaning through each generation, even each individual, that encounters them. Forged artefacts, and the stories and debates that circulate around them, have a place not only in the history of archaeology but also in our extended historiographies. The writers in this chapter, many of whom were not officially engaged with archaeological research, embraced this concept in ways that help us understand disciplinarity and historiography at the turn of the twentieth century. In sorting through and archiving the material record, considering fakes, hybrids, and ‘cannibalised’ objects requires a kind of transhistorical empathy that Vernon Lee anticipated. Remarkably, Lee’s historical empathy (discussed in Chapter 2) resounds in contemporary archaeological and geological fieldwork. Cultural geographer Caitlin DeSilvey recalls archiving materials at a historical homestead in Montana and ‘becom[ing] aware of ordering logics that preceded my presence’: I began to think about my work as extending, rather than obscuring, the archival instincts of the people who had left these things behind. I imagined myself collaborating with their collecting practice, picking up where they left off. In doing so, I tried to refuse the break that would place their work on the other side of an invisible line in the past, and my work in a sterile, forward-​looking present. When I was able to think things this way, I saw the place as already curated, a collection of objects and documents that, though they may have appeared illogical and cluttered, retained some of the emotional and experiential content vested in them by the people who had deposited them. This was mostly, of course, an act of imaginative empathy.129

DeSilvey’s reflection reveals ties between the fin-​de-​siècle archaeological imagination and recent developments in archival research. Moving more flexibly across that ‘break’ that proposes an impenetrable divide between ‘the past’ and the ‘sterile, forward-​ looking present’ of serious study, DeSilvey echoes the romanticising of Lee’s Lady Venetia and the ‘extended gaze’ of Andrew Lang. DeSilvey’s attention to ‘the emotional and experiential content vested in’ material culture, which too often escapes traditional heuristics of empirical analysis, invites us to see the stylistic experiments and

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adventurous fakeries of the turn of the twentieth century as vital parts of a richer historiography.

‘Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan’ In February 2010, a team of archaeologists commenced an underwater excavation off the coast of east Africa. Led by Andrew Lerner (Department of Archaeology, Centre for Maritime Studies, Aberdeen) and Piotr Klimek (Department of Archaeology, Gdynia Marine Archaeological Institute), as well as ecological experts and representatives from host countries, the team began exploring the ocean floor where remote mapping had revealed a range of unidentifiable objects. The team first discovered a seemingly classical statue of a female torso, lightly covered with coral. Inspired by this promising find, they sought further funding for the excavation. Knowing that funding would be difficult to access through the traditional channels, they turned to the notoriously eccentric contemporary artist Damien Hirst, who had recently concluded a successful auction. Hirst claims, ‘It really was the point where all the work, like, became commodity. It just seemed like you make something, sell it, make something, sell it, and it seemed unsustainable and unfulfilling.’130 For Hirst, who expresses a lingering childhood fascination with ‘fantasy shipwreck stories’, the excavation offered an opportunity for adventure and a way to escape the cycle of commodity creation. Over the course of three years, the team uncovered a bounty of beautiful art objects, determining that the artefacts likely belonged to a collector of the first century CE, one who participated in what one team-​member describes as that century’s ‘Roman market of plunder in earlier classical cities’, and whose ship wrecked while transporting his collection. Drawing from the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a mid-​first-​century text describing navigation and trading routes, which offers evidence for the extensive traffic across the upper Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, the researchers found support for the remarkably eclectic and cross-​cultural nature of the artefacts in the collection—​works that reflect aesthetic styles of classical Greece and Rome, Egypt, and the Far East, sometimes oddly in a single piece. The discovery of a very large bolt allowed Lerner and his crew to envision the apparently massive ship that carried this trove across the ocean before sinking. Though the team failed to find mention of such a large ship and its extravagant collector in historical sources by writers such as Tacitus or Pliny the Elder, team-​member Peter Weiss—​a bit of a romantic—​turned to tales of legend, and uncovered the story of Aulus Calidius Amotan, a freed slave who reportedly loved beautiful things and acquired a stunning collection. Planning to build a temple in which to exhibit his treasures, he built a large

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ship, called the Apistos, to carry them. According to myth, the ship reportedly wrecked or was capsized by a sea monster, and Amotan’s collection was lost to time. Though Weiss is perhaps the only crew member to confidently claim the team has found Amotan’s collection, several team members and Hirst himself expressed a cautious longing for the tale to be true. Hirst asserts, ‘History has always been rewritten and rewritten. You know, the solidity that we call history is written from fragments.’131 Highlighting the incompleteness of historical records and artefacts, Hirst also gestures to the dynamic and subjective nature of the historical record. Describing his reaction to a headless bronze statue uncovered at the site and believed to be the Mesopotamian Pazuzu demon, Hirst claims, I was asking myself, ‘Why am I believing it? Am I believing it because it’s got these missing parts?’ You believe it because, in a history of travelling through time, through thousands of years, it’s bound to have, you know, had accidents and mishaps. I love the way that time can age it and deteriorate it. It’s like the action of the world on this object. You realise that everything in the world is going to become fragments.132

Hirst celebrates the fragmentary nature of the historical record and admires the aesthetic of deterioration and decay. Focusing on ‘belief’, rather than ‘truth’, he suggests that we imaginatively fill the gaps in the historical record ourselves. Hirst continues, ‘That’s where belief really lies, between ­fragments […] What makes you believe in things is not what’s there, it’s what’s not there.’133 His discussion resembles Virginia Zimmerman’s claim about nineteenth-​century archaeological narratives: ‘Through geology—​and archaeology, which developed in the young science’s wake—​scientists fashioned narratives out of fragmented remains. The evidence they excavated revealed at once the extraordinary depth of time and the awesome ability of the writer to measure time and to craft its story.’134 Like Zimmerman, Hirst explores historiography as a craft, one which archaeological discoveries facilitate in stunning ways. The story of Amotan’s sunken and recovered treasures travelled then to an exhibit at the Palazzo Grassi, then the Punta Della Dogana in Venice, beginning in April 2017. The story of excavation and the final exhibit in Venice is recorded in Treasures of the Wreck of the Unbelievable—​a documentary film introducing the excavation team and featuring truly gorgeous imagery of the underwater finds. Viewers track the team across multiple locations, from the ocean floor to the University of Southampton; we see their squabbles, struggle to decipher the messages arriving through the scuba microphone, and wonder at the surprises they uncover. The film is a lush aesthetic adventure, gradually revealing the collection of beautiful items partially submerged in sand

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and covered with coral, their crevices inhabited by tropical fish. For much of the film, viewers see only hints of the collection in suggestive shots—​glints of gold, silhouettes of mythic shapes, or sculpted faces emerging from the sand—​art objects made almost more beautiful through their amalgamation with coral and seashells. A crewmember describes the discovery on the ocean floor as ‘strange Victorian grotto of the underworld’—​an apt comparison which invites us to consider the connections between this underwater trove and the rich archaeological collections of Victorian Britain.135 Additionally, beyond merely recording the excavation process, the film offers a rather self-​conscious discussion of the act of archaeological and art collection that emerged in the nineteenth century. For example, Treasures captures the almost gluttonous acquisition of gorgeous object after gorgeous object, taking time to study only a few of the many artefacts in a rather un-​archaeological way. Such greed seems to recall the first-​century Roman market of plunder mentioned earlier in the film and repeated through nineteenth-​century imperialism. Filmmakers interview the locals, from whom the details of the excavation are hidden, reminding viewers of archaeology’s history of exploitation of native peoples across the world. Additionally, the film features a constant tension between the scholar’s desire for historical detail and the voracious appetite for treasure. Crewmembers argue over the discovery of several gold pieces, a find which inspires both immense excitement and the sudden need for enhanced security. The word ‘treasure’ even escapes in a heated debate caught on film through closed blinds, angering lead archaeologist Lerner. Finally, Hirst, identifying himself as a collector, offers a discussion of Amotan and his aesthetic choices, inviting us to consider the stories that collectors seek to tell in their eclectic assemblages. Amotan’s collection includes a cyclops, demons, unicorns, and (in the shot just before the following statement) a Cerberus: ‘I think he genuinely believed in monsters […] Then I guess, if you believe in them in the beginning, then you, you know, you create things to justify their existence.’136 Here, Hirst highlights again the craft of historiography, noting how archaeological discovery and collections of art objects work to fill gaps in an incomplete record. And as far as ‘creat[ing] things’ to justify your wildest beliefs… that’s exactly what Hirst did. The entire, beautiful story is fake. The legend of Amotan, the tragically sunken Apistos (from the Greek ἄπῐστος, ‘not to be trusted’ or ‘unbelieving’), the team of archaeologists, the historicity of the artefacts, and the documentary that traces their journey to the Palazzo Grassi—​are all fictions. Sceptical viewers of the documentary might note as early as the initial discovery of the so-​called classical torso that there’s something off about these items. The torso, for example, features a strangely small, rather un-​classical waist. Viewers more familiar with Hirst himself likely suspect the deception all

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along. The anachronisms and oddities of the beautiful items become more glaring as the film continues, until we are in the Palazzo Grassi looking at a bust of the Egyptian Aten that is clearly Rhianna, or the Transformer Optimus Prime covered in coral, or a Barbie torso (stamped ‘Made in China’) that reveals why that first torso looked so uncannily familiar. The whole story, from discovery to exhibit, is what Oscar Wilde might call a ‘beautiful untrue thing’. Indeed, a cast member about forty-​eight minutes into the film calls the finds ‘truly beautiful’, a claim whose irony stands out to me long after the film is over. Hirst’s archaeological fantasy is of course controversial. Some critics utterly panned the exhibit and project as a whole. One reviewer calls it ‘a compelling concept that has had the life strangled out of it’, ‘excessive kitsch’, ‘a showroom for oligarchs’.137 Another reviewer for The Telegraph claims: ‘[T]‌ his spectacular failure could be the shipwreck of [Hirst’s] 138 career.’ Yet another calls it ‘undoubtedly one of the worst exhibitions of contemporary art staged in the past decade […] devoid of ideas, aesthetically bland, and ultimately snooze-​inducing’.139 Popular reviews of the documentary on IMDB often give the film one star, with taglines like ‘A Fake’, ‘Mediocre art disguised as a science documentary’, ‘Lies’, and ‘Fraud’. Reviewers who feel deceived and even angry complain that the film violates the inviolable decree that, in the words of one reviewer, ‘A documentary provides a factual report not someone’s fantasy.’140 Some viewers are furious that Hirst would borrow the conventions of a good documentary to tell an untrue story. And yet, for scholars of British aestheticism and archaeological discourse at the fin de siècle, approaching the hoax from the outside, especially those with a love for Oscar Wilde, the ‘hoax’ might be enjoyed through pure pleasure at what is, at any rate, ‘truly beautiful’. According to the narrator of Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W.H., ‘We had no right to quarrel with an artist for the conditions under which he chooses to present his work; and that all Art being to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality on some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and limitations of real life, to censure an artist for forgery was to confuse an ethical with an aesthetical problem.’141 Hirst’s massive project and exhibit brings us to a plane far ‘out of reach of the trammeling accidents and limitations of real life’. ‘Out of the sea will rise Behemoth and Leviathan’, Wilde declares. And Hirst delivers. ‘[O]‌ver our heads will float the Blue Bird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be.’142 Even Hirst’s admiration for the aesthetic of decay that pervades the collection echoes the late-​Victorian embrace of decadence and world-​weariness. Taking the documentary and the exhibit together, and considering the

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work’s consistent meta-​discussion on commodification, plunder, collection, and historiography, we ought to recognise a commentary on the archaeological fantasy and its role in reshaping or overturning historical narratives and conceptions of value. We can read this massive hoax in relation to the fin-​de-​siècle archaeological fantasies that made it possible. In particular, Hirst’s project and the controversy that surrounds it invites us to return to some of the late-​Victorian discussions about art and historiography, and the archaeological fakes and fiascos that challenged the discourses of historical authority. Hirst’s Treasures is not merely gluttony or kitsch. It is not a fraud; it’s pure Aestheticism. It’s Wilde’s wet dream.

Conclusion In their innovative interdisciplinary book, Theatre/​Archaeology (2001), Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks present the concept of a ‘deep map’, which ‘attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and inter-​penetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place’.143 This chapter has argued that archaeological forgeries and the discussions surrounding them are an important part of the story of the turn of the twentieth century. Even fakes—​and in some ways, especially fakes—​offer ways of understanding ‘the grain and patina’ of a place and time. Classicist David Harvey refers to the recent move in archaeology to consider ‘other stories’ and ‘ “minor figures” who are engaged in knowledge production’, suggesting that these ‘small stories might also be challenging, through undermining existing (meta-) narratives of knowledge production’.144 Several of the writers examined in this chapter prefigure these arguments as they grapple with the increasing specialisation and institutionalisation of archaeological knowledge. Turning our attention to the fakes and counterfeits that troubled authorities at the fin ​de s​ iècle helps us to create a ‘deep map’ of the turn of the twentieth century, even perhaps one like ‘the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable’ on which ‘Behemoth and Leviathan’ rise out of the sea, ‘and sail round the high-​pooped galleys’.145

Notes 1 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’ [1889, 1891], in Isobel Murray (ed.), Oscar Wilde: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 238.

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2 Thomas Hoving, False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-​ Time Art Fakes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 26. 3 Ibid. 4 E.g., Aviva Briefel, The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); a 2018 issue of Victorian Network dedicated to ‘Forgery and Imitation’, edited by Briefel; Sara Malton, Forgery in Nineteenth-​Century Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde (New York: Palgrave, 2009); Joseph Bristow and Rebecca Mitchell (eds), Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-​ Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); and Greg Mackie’s Beautiful Untrue Things: Forging Oscar Wilde’s Extraordinary Afterlife (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). 5 Mark Jones (ed.), with Paul Craddock and Nicolas Barker, Fake?: The Art of Deception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 13. 6 Briefel, Deceivers, p. 31. 7 Jones, Fake?, p. 14. 8 Regenia Gagnier, Review of Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente (eds), Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), which appears in Victorian Studies 45:3 (2003), 581–​583. Though mostly disappointed by the collection as a whole, Gagnier highlights its attention to the fact ‘that the disciplines were always messy compromises between epistemic knowledges, institutional statuses, and pragmatic regimens’, p. 581. 9 Jones, Fake?, p. 161. 10 John Evans, ‘The Forgery of Antiquities’, Longman’s Magazine 23:134 (December 1893), p. 144–​145. 11 Evans, ‘Forgery’, pp. 145–​146, 147–​148. 12 ‘Archaeological Frauds in Palestine’, St. James’s Gazette (2 January 1885), p. 6. 13 ‘Forged Antiquities’, Norwich Mercury (38 March 1903), p. 3. I have replaced the strange typographical or spelling error that appears in the original as ‘pseuo-​sarcop a-​gus’ with [pseudo-​sarcophagus]. 14 Paul Eudel, Le Truquage: Les Contrefaçons dévoilées. Paris: E. Dentu, 1884. Summarised in Briefel, Deceivers, p. 71. 15 Evans, ‘Forgery’, p. 146; David Bailey, ‘Tanagra and Asia Minor Figurines’ in Mark Jones (ed.), Fake? The Art of Deception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 169–​170. 16 M. Jourdain, ‘Collection of Counterfeits: A Unique Exhibition of Art Fakes and Forgeries at Burlington House’, Sphere (21 June 1924). 17 ‘Spurious Antiques. South Kensington Museum Victimised’, Sheffield Daily Telegraph (14 April, 1903), p. 8. 18 Jones, Fake?, p. 11. 19 Hoving, False Impressions, p. 67. 20 Barbara Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 4. Similarly, Sara

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Malton explains, ‘Cultural institutions themselves, such as the bank and governmental bureaucracy, facilitate the forger’s suppression of truth, preventing access to a coherent narrative of financial and genealogical origins’, p. 16. 21 Wilde, ‘The Truth of Masks’, in Intentions (Leipzig: Heinemann and Balistier, 1891), p. 190. 22 Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, p. 217. 23 Letter to H.A. Holden (December 1887). UCLA Department of Special Collections. H. Rider Haggard Papers. Collection 418. 24 Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, p. 219. 25 Ibid., p. 238. 26 Quoted in Robert Munro, Archaeology and False Antiquities (London: Methuen and Company, 1905), p. 178. 27 Munro, Archaeology, p. 2. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., pp. 1–​2. 30 Ibid., p. 2. 31 Ibid., p. 14. 32 Ibid., p. 21. 33 Ibid., pp. 18–​19. Here, he quotes his own work in Rambles and Studies in Bosnia-​Herzegovina and Dalmatia, 1900, 2nd edn. 34 A stereotype (n). is: ‘The method or process of printing in which a solid plate of type-​metal, cast from a papier-​mâché or plaster mould taken from the surface of a forme of type, is used for printing from instead of the forme itself’ (Oxford English Dictionary Online). 35 Munro, Archaeology, pp. 9–​10. 36 Ibid., p. 19. 37 Briefel, Deceivers, p. 55. 38 Ibid., p. 56. 39 Vernon Lee, Louis Norbert: A Two-​Fold Romance (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1914), p. 235. 40 Evans, ‘Forgery’, p. 154. 41 Munro, Archaeology, p. 11. 42 Ibid., pp. 11–​12. 43 Ibid., p. 274. 44 Ibid. 45 Andrew Lang, The Clyde Mystery: A Study in Forgeries and Folklore (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905), p. 7. 46 Ibid., p. 9. 47 Ibid., pp. 12–​13. 48 Ibid., p. 13. 49 Ibid., pp. 103–​104. 50 Ibid., p. 53. 51 Ibid., p. 55. 52 Ibid., p. 56. 53 Ibid., pp. 62, 140.

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54 Ibid., p. 62. 55 Ibid., p. 130. 56 Quoted in Lang, The Clyde Mystery, p. 133. 57 Ibid., p. 134. 58 Ibid. 59 Evans, ‘Forgery’, p. 23. 60 T.G. Wakeling, Forged Egyptian Antiquities (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1912), p. 149. 61 Ibid., p. 36. 62 Evans, ‘Forgery’, p. 142–​143. 63 Ibid., p. 143. 64 Ibid. 65 Munro, Archaeology, pp. 19–​20. 66 Hoving, False Impressions, p. 19. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., p. 20. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., p. 21. 71 Walter Pater, The Renaissance [1873] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 119. 72 Ibid., p. 120. 73 Pater, The Renaissance, p. 95. 74 George Levine, Realism, Ethics, and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 187. 75 Evans, ‘Forgery’, pp. 151–​152. 76 Jones, Fake?, p. 187. 77 Evans, ‘Forgery’, p. 152. 78 He is almost always a man. For a discussion of the gender dynamics of nineteenth century art forgery, see Briefel, Deceivers, pp. 32–​52. 79 Quoted in Munro, Archaeology, p. 111. 80 Quoted in Munro, Archaeology, p. 111. 81 Ibid. 82 Quoted in Munro, Archaeology, p. 112–​113. 83 Ibid., p. 115. 84 Quoted in Munro, Archaeology, p. 115. 85 Briefel, Deceivers, p. 27. The article she cites is ‘Flint Jack’, All the Year Round (9 March 1867), p. 260. 86 Jones, Fake?, p. 185; Hoving, False Impressions, p. 77. 87 Hoving, False Impressions, p. 77. 88 Jones, Fake?, p. 185; Hoving, False Impressions, p. 77. 89 Jones, Fake?, p. 185. 90 Hoving, False Impressions, p. 77. 91 Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 2014), p. 262. 92 Wilde, ‘The Truth of Masks’, p. 190.

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93 Hoving, False Impressions, p. 77. 94 Lang, The Clyde Mystery, p. 69. 95 Ibid., pp. 105–​106. 96 Ibid., pp. 119–​120. 97 Ibid., p. 140. 98 Ibid., p. 8. 99 Hoving, False Impressions, p. 183. 100 Ibid., pp. 182–​183. 101 Quoted in Munro, Archaeology, p. 22. 102 ‘The Tiara of Saitaphernes’, Toronto Saturday Night (6 June 1903), p. 5. 103 Hoving, False Impressions, pp. 185–​188. 104 Briefel, Deceivers, p. 7. 105 ‘Tiara of Saitaphernes’, p. 5. 106 Briefel, Deceivers, p. 27. 107 Quoted in Munro, Archaeology, p. 22. 108 The etymology and definitions are from ‘artefact’, Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed 29 July 2021). 109 Evans, ‘Forgery’, p. 147; Lang, The Clyde Mystery, p. 34. 110 The etymology and definitions are from ‘forge’, Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed 29 July 2021). 111 Evans, ‘Forgery’, p. 147; Lang, The Clyde Mystery p. 34; Munro, Archaeology, p. 274. 112 Evans, ‘Forgery’, p. 143. 113 John Taylor, ‘Wooden Figure of an Egyptian Jackal-​Headed Deity’, in Mark Jones (ed.), Fake? The Art of Deception, pp. 167–​168. 114 Ibid., p. 144. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Bailey, ‘Tanagra and Asia Minor Figures’, pp. 169–​170. 120 ‘From our London Correspondent’, Leeds Mercury (17 December 1900), p. 4. 121 Debbie Challis, ‘Fashioning Archaeology into Art: Greek Sculpture, Dress Reform and Health in the 1880s’, Journal of Literature and Science 5:1 (2012), 53. 122 Bailey, ‘Tanagra and Asia Minor Figures’, p. 170. 123 Hoving, False Impressions, p. 73. 124 Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), p. 2. 125 Hoving, False Impressions, p. 73. 126 ‘Modern Antiques’, Derby Mercury (25 August 1880), p. 6. 127 Hoving, False Impressions, p. 26. 128 Ibid., p. 27. 129 Caitlin DeSilvey, ‘Art and Archive: Memory-​Work on a Montana Homestead’, Journal of Historial Geography 33 (2007), 888.

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130 Damien Hirst and Sam Hobkinson, dir. Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable (Oxford: Oxford Film Company, 2017), 10:15–​20. 131 Ibid., 33:45–​50. 132 Ibid., 35:00–​36:00. 133 Ibid. 134 Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, p. 2. 135 Hirst and Hobkinson, Treasures, 14:46. 136 Ibid., 36:35. 137 Tiernan Morgan, ‘Damien Hirst’s Shipwreck Fantasy Sinks in Venice’, Hyperallergic (10 August 2017), https://​hypera​ller​gic.com/​391​158/​dam​ien-​ hirst-​treasu​res-​from-​the-​wreck-​of-​the-​unbel​ieva​ble-​ven​ice-​punta-​della-​dog​ ana-​pala​zzo-​gra​ssi/​ 138 Alastair Sooke, ‘Damien Hirst, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, Review’, Telegraph (6 April 2017), www.telegr​aph.co.uk/​art/​what-​to-​see/​dam​ ien-​hirst-​treasu​res-​wreck-​unbel​ieva​ble-​rev​iew-​spec​tacu​lar/​ 139 Andrew Russeth, ‘A Disastrous Damien Hirst Show in Venice’, ARTnews (8 May 2017), www.artn​ews.com/​artn​ews/​news/​a-​dis​astr​ous-​dam​ien-​hirst-​ show-​in-​ven​ice-​8262/​ 140 villaric-​49312, ‘FAKE and a Waste of Time’, Review of Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, IMDb (23 January 2018), www.imdb.com/​user/​ur8​ 4680​849/​revi​ews 141 Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H. (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921), pp. 76–​77. 142 Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, p. 238. 143 Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/​Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 64–​65. 144 David Harvey, ‘Broad Down, Devon: Archaeological and Other Stories’, Journal of Material Culture 15:3 (2010), 356–​357. doi: 10.1177/​1359183510373984 145 Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, p. 238.

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4 Our real life in tombs: Great War archaeology

Archaeology and war have an enduring and ambiguous relationship—​both create in the very act of destroying. While all wars produce dramatic shifts in human behaviour which can leave vivid archaeological traces, it is the material and psychological immensity of industrialized conflict which embodies the extremes of our behaviours—​from a nation’s production and mobilization of material force, to an individual’s struggle with injury, loss, and despair.1 (Nicholas J. Saunders)

On 13 November 1917, Great War artist Paul Nash wrote to his wife Margaret from France: ‘This afternoon I go up the line to stay at a Brigade H.Q. for a night or two from where I shall see wonderful things.’2 This claim should register quite eerily to us as a backwards echo of Howard Carter’s exclamation in 1922 upon witnessing the treasures in Tutankhamen’s tomb. Anticipating a sublime encounter, perhaps along the lines of Carter’s confrontation with beautiful ruin, Nash experiences a vastly different sort of wonder on the front. His anticipation of ‘wonderful things’ suggests what contemporary archaeologist Nicholas Saunders claims in the epigraph to this chapter—​that war, in its traumatic and contradictory effects on civilisation and the human psyche, bears a close relationship to archaeology, which likewise ‘creates in the act of destroying’. This chapter positions Nash alongside the modernist writer Mary Butts, and traces these artists’ prolonged engagement with archaeological discourse, exploring how across several genres (life writing, essays, visual art, and the novel) they turn to the prehistoric landscapes of Great Britain to mediate the catastrophic incursions of modernity on the natural world and the human psyche. Nash’s prose and images during wartime also conjure scenes of uncanny archaeological ruin reminiscent of images of Pompeii—​ an association which is corroborated by other first-​ hand witnesses of No Man’s Land. The middle section of this chapter delves into this comparison, demonstrating how writers including Louise Mack (an Australian journalist), Marcel Proust, H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], and various soldiers reshape Victorian narratives of the volcanic destruction and archaeological

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discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum (by writers like Edward BulwerLytton) to historicise the war’s destruction. Ultimately, these discussions reveal how archaeological narratives of ruin and rebirth helped writers and artists craft unofficial and dissonant historiographies of the First World War. The chapter concludes with a look at contemporary excavations of First World War battlefields in France, revealing how writers and archaeologists are borrowing these same tropes as we uncover the First World warscape. In contrast to the alluring aesthetic possibilities of mummies, treasures, and tombs discovered in the dust, this chapter uncovers how the brutal and devastating realities of the Great War changed the way artists envisioned and represented time, the human body, and the earth itself. The writers and forgers in Chapter 3 turned to archaeological fakes and dubious artefacts to negotiate anxieties over legitimacy, intellectual hierarchy, and types of value. Debates over forgery were often spurred in part by a growing desire to reconcile the crises of modernity and industrial war with human beings’ deeply ancient or ‘primitive’ beginnings. The First World War’s utter devastation and violence necessarily fuelled this desire. Both transforming and producing archaeological landscapes and narratives, the Great War forced a generation to rethink its so-​called civilisation. Thus, the writers and artists in this chapter work to conceptualise and reshape history in ways connected to, but different from, the writers in Chapter 3. Creating dissonant or otherwise unofficial records of their historical moment, these figures attempt to make sense—​ historically, aesthetically, and personally—​ of a brutal and unprecedented situation. In doing so, they not only produce formally experimental art, but also shape major historical ideologies and political rhetoric of the early twentieth century. Scholarship devoted to the Great War and its aesthetic and historical impact often falls on either side of two understandings. Many scholars approach the war as a ‘watershed’ event: a catastrophe of previously unimaginable scale that severed nearly all continuities with the past and birthed entirely new futures. A second approach, embodied in the Annales school, which emerged in France after the war and led by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, works to recognise historical continuity over the long term, in reference to a scale not structured by events, but transcending both periodicity and nation and manifesting deeper processes of change. Both approaches, however, recognise that the devastating realities of the war necessitated immediate attention to how scholars can ethically study and historicise a catastrophe of unimagined proportions—​a nearly worldwide phenomenon that, in the deaths of millions, undermined the very idea of proportion itself. At his inaugural lecture at the University of Strasbourg in December 1919, Febvre famously questioned the role of ‘l’histoire dans le monde en ruines’: ‘Ai-​je le droit, historien que j’étais, de reprendre aujourd’hui ma besogne d’historien?

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Faire de l’histoire. Enseigner de l’histoire. Remuer des cendres les unes toutes froides déjà, les autres encore tièdes, les plus récentes presque chaudes —​ mais cendres toutes, résidu inerte d’existences consumées’ (‘Do I have the right, historian that I was, to reshoulder today the task of being a historian? To study history. To teach history. To stir up the ashes, some already cold, others warm, and the most recent nearly hot—​but ashes all the same, inert residues of consumed existences.)3 He likens historical study after the war to the stirring of ashes, some cold, ‘inert residues of consumed existences’. This invocation of a world in ruins and lives transformed to ash suggests the archaeological discourse surrounding Pompeii, to which I return below. Fernand Braudel, a second-​ generation Annales scholar, who coined the phrase longue durée, identified history’s particular concern in the larger realm of human sciences as ‘this living, intimate, infinitely repeated opposition between the instant of time and that time which flows only slowly’.4 In The History Manifesto (2014), Jo Guldi and David Armitage explain that what Braudel and many who followed him sought was ‘the relationship between agency and environment over the longue durée’.5 Archaeology, in its preservation of individual human action over great expanses of time, offers unique ways of understanding this relationship between agency and environment. Examining how writers and visual artists during and after the war engage with archaeological discourse to historicise the war’s shock, this chapter thus reveals how archaeological objects and sites aided a traumatised generation in navigating the tensions between ‘the instant of time and that time which flows only slowly’. In what follows, I demonstrate how artists across genres and with a range of war experience carried deeply historical landscapes and forms into the war, deploying and converting these forms to register dramatic personal, topographical, and geo-​political change. In uncovering the works of mostly non-​canonical writers across genres, this chapter supplements an enormous body of scholarship of Great War literature which focuses on a small contingent of canonical, mostly male British writers, and which mostly addresses poetry. In his foundational monograph The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), cultural and literary historian Paul Fussell delves into irony as the dominant mode through which the war was represented. He categorises the most successful and canonical writers of the war by a somewhat surprising heuristic: the most formally innovative writers, ‘the masters of the modern movement’—​Yeats, Woolf, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce—​who were not directly involved in the war—​and ‘lesser talents’—​Sassoon, Graves, and Blunden—​who were left ‘to recall in literary form a war they had actually experienced’.6 The ‘compulsion’ of the latter, he claims, ‘to render the unprecedented actualities they had experienced brought them fully to grips with the modern theme which we now recognise as the essence of [Northrup]

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Frye’s ironic mode’.7 In the four decades since the publication of this major work, subsequent scholars have broadened the canon somewhat, and have engaged with the politics of the genre of war in increasingly complex ways. Without challenging the dominant mythos of the war as a tragically ironic affair, this chapter takes a distinctive route—​via archaeological discourse—​ into the literary and aesthetic mediation of the Great War’s tragic irony. In examining the different ways these artists adapt archaeological experience to navigate the war’s catastrophic procedures and effects, we see how the fin-​de-​siècle archaeological fantasy is reshaped in the twentieth century to produce experimental aesthetic modes and new ways of understanding the self, the earth, and time in a world suddenly and violently transformed.

Paul Nash in No Man’s Land In September 1914, Paul Nash enlisted for home service, despite initial ­reluctance.8 After enrolling in officer training in 1916, he was sent in February 1917 to the Western Front, at St Eloi on the Ypres Salient (Belgium). While Nash wrote home from the trenches with bitterness about British newspaper propaganda—​‘as if I heard all the pap being made & dripping, dripping into the foolish blubber mouth of the people which greedily laps it up’—​there were no major engagements during his three months at St Eloi.9 In late May 1917, Nash fell into a trench and broke a rib, returning to the Swedish War Hospital in London just a few days before the assault on Hill 60, during which much of his regiment died. During the summer of 1917, Nash recovered, exhibited some of his drawings at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and campaigned successfully for a job as an official war artist. He returned to the Ypres Salient in November 1917, this time keen to observe combat on the front lines. Nash’s drawings and paintings inspired by his time at the front remain some of the most iconic images of the war, and certain letters (particularly two letters written to his wife on 13 and 17 November 1917) are frequently excerpted in historical scholarship for their powerful descriptions of the war’s devastation. Witnessing the aftermath of the Second Battle of Passchendaele, Nash recorded the utter waste of the landscape, and according to Richard Cork, ‘defined the reality of the killing fields’.10 Nash’s representations of the front invoke a range of archaeological themes, navigating the strange phenomenon of live men beneath the ground, and inviting parallels between the battlefield and archaeological sites, such as Pompeii. Scholars have consistently identified a dramatic shift in the style of Nash’s work after his return to the front. First highlighting, in art historian Anja Foerschner’s words, Nash’s ‘preoccupation with technique

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and his still-​romantic outlook on the world’ in his landscapes before his return to the front—​scholars then generally recognise a turn to the complete devastation registered in his more famous paintings displayed after he returned home.11 This chapter, however, recovers Nash’s work in a new way, recognising through a study of his life writing and art a more complex trajectory. Nash was interested, I suggest, in what contemporary archaeologists call ‘ideational landscapes’—​landscapes that are imaginative (i.e., a mental image) and emotional (‘cultivating or eliciting some spiritual value or ideal’), and ‘may provide moral messages, recount mythic histories, and record ­genealogies’.12 The ideational landscapes of Wittenham Clumps—​a pair of prehistoric mounds in Oxfordshire—​as well as a drawing entitled The Pyramids in the Sea, function in Nash’s oeuvre as forms through which he mediates trauma and a destabilised sense of time and place. In their introduction to Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives (1999), Wendy Ashmore and Arthur Knapp note that ‘landscapes embody time at different scales’, thus uniquely registering human and non-​human experience: ‘[S]‌ince landscapes embody multiple times as well as multiple places, they thereby materialise not only continuity and sequence, but potentially change and transformation as well.’13 Ashmore and Knapp explain, ‘It is the repetitive use and structured modification of an ideational landscape that yields the palimpsest archaeologists study.’14 Making use of the ways in which landscapes embody time at different scales, Nash transplants the formal contours of familiar ideational landscapes like Wittenham Clumps and pyramid shapes onto the unfamiliar and frightening landscapes of war. The first prehistoric landscape of importance for Nash is Wittenham Clumps, two drawings of which he completed in 1912, entitled Under the Hill and The Wood on the Hill.15 He describes the site in his autobiography (Outline), which was composed in 1936 or 1937: ‘There were two hills, both dome-​like and each planted with a thick clump of trees whose mass had a curiously symmetrical sculptured form. At the foot of these hills grew the dense wood of Wittenham, part of the early forest where the polecat still yelled in the night hours.’16 The particular forms Nash emphasises in this remembrance—​the ‘dome-​shaped’ hills, and ‘thick clump of trees’, with ‘curiously symmetrical sculptured’ shapes—​appear in his earliest works and emerge corrupted and contorted in his war images. In a letter to Mercia Oakley, a close friend and early romantic interest, Nash described the Clumps in ways that evoke the ‘ideational landscape’ of contemporary archaeology: ‘grey hallowed hills crowned by old old trees, Pan-​nish places down by the river wonderful to think on, full of strange enchantment […] a beautiful legendary country haunted by old Gods long forgotten’.17

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Nash was fascinated by the mounds’ shape, the swatch of rounded trees at their peak, and their continued occupation over millennia, as well as their corresponding attachment to ‘wonderful’ ancient mysteries.18 Nash’s retrospective recollection of these forms in his autobiography evinces their aesthetic influence: Ever since I remember them the Clumps had meant something to me. I felt their importance long before I knew their history. They eclipsed the impression of all the early landscapes I knew. This, I am certain, was due almost entirely to their formal features rather than to any associative force. For although in my mind they stood apart from other symbolism … it was the look of them that told most, whether on sight or in memory. They were the Pyramids of my small world.19

Nash’s claim to have ‘felt’ the importance of the hills suggests his inborn attachment to the ancient landscape. However, feeling their significance without a knowledge of their history, Nash claims it is their ‘formal features’ that struck him, rather than historical associations. In claiming the Clumps ‘stood apart from other symbolism’, Nash gestures to fin-​de-​siècle aesthetic movements and debates, suggesting a uniquely intuitive aesthetic vision that is yet culturally embedded in modern art movements. Additionally, his reference to pyramids suggests that, like the pyramids of Egypt incited profound wonder for many Westerners, the Wittenham Clumps of his native landscape intimated undisclosed mysteries much closer to home. The same year he completed the drawings of Wittenham Clumps, he also produced a drawing entitled The Pyramids in the Sea [Figure 4.1]. The Egyptian pyramids, like Wittenham Clumps, take on formal and conceptual significance in Nash’s works. Nash wrote on 21 August 1912 to the poet Gordon Bottomley about the conception of this drawing. He relates a frustrating creative drought during which he began and then tore up several pictures: ‘[M]‌y brain seemed a hollow tunnel thro’ which stupid meaningless trains of thought rushed, or just aimless winds of nothing at all. At last I nearly wept; indeed I did cry inside and make an attempt at weeping but returned soon to my board and suddenly did a queer drawing of pyramids crashing about in the sea in uncanny eclipsed moonlight.’20 In this quite Romantic recollection, The Pyramids in the Sea came to Nash in a flash of inspiration, or at least this is how he chose to represent this significant moment. In his letter to Bottomley and in the image itself, Nash appears to imaginatively prefigure the darkened skies and uncanny juxtapositions of shape—​strange encounters between things otherwise kept apart—​which he would see at the front. Nash was evidently thinking about pyramids during his officer training. In a letter to his wife Margaret on 2 November 1916

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Figure 4.1  Paul Nash, The Pyramids in the Sea, 1912. (Tate, London, UK)

from Camberley Staff College, he writes about a ‘lecture on Egypt by an old barnacled colonel of Engineers’ featuring ‘lantern slides’, and claims: ‘I was enthralled of course by the pictures of pyramids and Gypsy Kings but most people went to sleep and not a few snored audibly.’21 Implying through ‘of course’ that his fondness for the pyramids was well known, Nash sets himself apart from his less Egyptologically inclined fellow officers-​in-​training, who nap through the presentation. In Nash’s letters and visual art from his earlier days in Belgium and then France, he represents the scenes of war in ways that might surprise readers familiar with the horrifying and ironic Great War mythos handed down by canonical figures like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Edmund Blunden. Claims like, ‘Here in the back garden of the trenches it is amazingly beautiful & the mud is dried to a pinky colour’, or ‘I am happier in the trenches than anywhere (out here!)’ certainly seem to describe some other war.22 In fact, his first several months in Europe, during which he experienced very little violent action and toured what he calls ‘the most

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enchanting country’ near the Seine (March 1917), appears to have brought Nash out of a depression evident in his letters from late 1915 and 1916.23 Previous to his first trip abroad, while stationed at Romford, Nash appears alternately restless, bored, and deeply depressed. However, in the letter from 7 March 1917, where he praises the dried pink mud of the trenches, Nash also records what seems to be his first darker meditation on the violence of war on the countryside he loved: [I]‌n a wood we passed thro’ on our way up, a place with an evil name, pitted & pocked with shells, the trees torn to shreds, often reeking with poison gas—​a most desolate ruinous place [.] Two months back, today it was a vivid green: the broken [cut?] trees even had sprouted somewhere and in the midst, from the depths of the woods [bruised?] heart, poured out the throbbing song of a nightingale. Ridiculous mad incongruity! one cant think which is the more absurd, the War or Nature.24

Nature here has been polluted rapidly by the gruesome technologies of war, and yet at this point still sprouts new life from the ruin. For the scholar perusing his letters, the ‘[r]‌idiculous mad incongruity’ Nash witnesses here reads like Nature’s final gasp. In his writings after returning to the front in November 1917 as an official war artist, Nash expresses similar lamentations about the destroyed trees and utter ruin, along with the ‘incongruity’ produced by the violence of modern technology on nature. However, in this second trip incongruity gives way to utter farcicality; in reading his letters we seem to witness what Northrop Frye described as ‘a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity’ that characterises the ironic mode, and which Fussell has applied thoroughly to Great War literature.25 In Nash’s letter from 13 November 1917, with which this chapter began, Nash writes to Margaret from France: ‘This afternoon I go up the line to stay at a Brigade H.Q. for a night or two from where I shall see wonderful things.’26 Returning to the letter after his time ‘up the line’—​after his first real encounter with the war’s most violent and most iconic spaces—​Nash describes what he saw. The passages he produces immediately following his encounter are those most frequently excerpted from his letters. His tone of excitement early in the letter is transformed upon his return to utter astonishment, disbelief, and anger: ‘I have seen the most frightful nightmere [sic] of a country ever conceived by Dante or Poe—​unspeakable utterly indescribable.’ His implicit comparison between the Western Front and the hell of Dante is one of several representations across First World War literature that evoke the experience of submersion in a strange subterranean underworld, or Hell itself. In Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’, for example, the speaker begins, ‘It seemed that out of the battle I escaped /​Down some profound dull tunnel,

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long since scooped’, and eventually meets ‘encumbered sleepers’ (lines 1–​2, 4). When one sleeper looks up, and lifts his hands—​a man the speaker had killed the day before—​the speaker claims, ‘And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—​/​By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell’ (lines 9–​10).27 Owen’s poem depicts the appalling irony that the men who kill each other live and die in the same hellish space. Nash’s letter continues to explain the ‘frightful nightmere [sic]’: ‘In the 15 drawings I made I may give you some vague idea of its horror but only being in it and of it can ever make you sensible of its dreadful nature & what men in France have to face.’ The experience of war, in Nash’s rendering, is such that words and traditional media seem insufficient: ‘[N]‌o pen or drawing can convey this country.’ He continues to provide some vision of ‘the normal setting of the battles taking place day & night, month after month’: Sunset & sunrise are blasphemous mockeries to man; only the blak [sic] rain out of the bruised & swollen clouds or thro’ the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on; the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green white water, the roads & trucks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze & sweat and the shells never cease. They whine & plunge over head tearing away the rotting tree stumps, breaking the plank roads, striking down horses & mules; annihilating, maiming maddening; they plunge into the grave which is this land, one huge grave—​and cast up the poor dead. O it is unspeakable, godless, hopeless.28

Though Nash is known as a painter, it is no wonder that this letter is so often cited. The passage reads like it was written in a flash of angry inspiration, produced as a direct result of his encounter ‘up the line’. The sentences are strung together almost without a breath, lists interspersed with commas and semicolons rather than independent clauses with full stops, reproducing grammatically the excess of the violence. This vivid description foregrounds what struck Nash most powerfully in the war, and what his images translate—​the war’s devastation of the landscape and the transfiguration of beautiful country into reeking, incongruous ruin. Trees, like wounded bodies, ‘ooze & sweat’, and the earth is viciously upturned, yielding the recently dead. The fin-​de-​siècle archaeological fantasy of excavating the long-​deceased has here gone horribly wrong. Bertram notes that at least nine of Nash’s drawings from the front are ‘mud close-​ups’, images of ‘the writhing earth itself’, demonstrating Nash’s horrified fascination with the convulsions of mud and the corruption of the boundary between surface and depth.29 Years later, in the 1920s, T.E. Lawrence (i.e., Lawrence of Arabia) asked Nash to create illustrations based on Lawrence’s photographs of Petra, an event that further demonstrates Nash’s reputation for

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archaeological imagery.30 Nash wrote, ‘[W]‌hat a place! Petra the city of the Dead! O what a dream!’31 If Petra was a dream, Passchendaele was a nightmare. Nash’s description of the front represents the violent technology of the war as an almost-​living force, destroying and polluting the natural world and creating its own hellish landscape in a way that surpasses the much slower, gentler ravages of time upon places such as Petra. Many of the fifteen drawings mentioned in his letter served as drafts for Nash’s larger paintings finished on his return to England in December 1917. In Wire (1918–​19), We Are Making a New World (1918) [Figure 4.2], Void (1918), and The Menin Road (1919) [Figure 4.3], images which emphasise mounds of earth and jagged structures created by shelling, Nash returns to the mound and pyramid shapes that fascinated him before the war. In We Are Making a New World, piles of mud recall both Nash’s depictions of Wittenham Clumps, and, perhaps more strikingly, the waves of The Pyramids in the Sea. The torn and naked trees, like the pyramids, appear ‘crashing about in the sea’ (to use the words from Nash’s letter to Bottomley) of churned mud. Repeating the wave and pyramid shapes in strange juxtapositions of natural smoothness and unnatural edges, Nash emphasises the devastating encounter between modern technology and the natural world. The Menin Road alternates mounds of earth with large triangular fragments, the harsh diagonal vectors of light, shadow, and broken trees and structures further emphasising triangular shapes punctuating the smooth mud and sullied water. Nash has transplanted familiar forms from domestic ideational landscapes onto the devastated battlefields of the war. Rather than seeing these images as divorced from his pre-​war works, attention to the repetition of these forms allows us to recognise how Nash translated the horrific scenes of war through familiar, prehistoric landscapes. The archaeological themes Nash employs produce visions of a strikingly uncanny landscape. Before the war, Nash had described his drawing The Pyramids in the Sea as ‘a queer drawing of pyramids crashing about in the sea in uncanny eclipsed moonlight’. His sense of his drawing as queer, along with his conception of the lighting as ‘uncanny’, indicate both aesthetic uncertainty about, and enchantment with, the drawing’s possibilities. Years later, during his first stint in Europe, Nash writes to his wife and describes sunset, meditating, [A]‌perfect crescent sails uncannily below pale stars. As the dark gathers the horizon brightens & again vanishes as the very lights rise & fall shedding their wierd [sic] greenish glare over the land and in acute contrast to their easy silent flight breaks out the agitated knocking of the machine guns as they sweep the parapets.32

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This passage highlights again the uncanniness of moonlight over an unfamiliar landscape, the atmosphere pierced by the sound of guns. The entire letter presents the landscape of the war in stunning prose. In the works he produces during and after the war, Nash explores the uncanniness of No Man’s Land that other first-​hand accounts often refer to, and which is also associated with archaeological sites. Freud’s uncanny, the unheimlich, or ‘unhomely’, is ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’, as well as ‘nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-​established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’.33 In his introduction to Freud’s 1919 essay devoted to the uncanny, Hugh Haughton claims, ‘[T]‌his essay, as much as “Mourning and Melancholia” or “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” of 1915, is a response to the war and written in its immediate aftermath.’34 Considering Freud’s analogy of archaeological excavation and psychoanalysis, it should come as no surprise that archaeological experience in the early twentieth century would also be entangled with experiences of the uncanny. In his works Nash represents the strange violation of the horizontal axis—​what is above ground and what is under—​and explores the images of mud and decay, reflecting the archaeological uncanny to render the battlefields of No Man’s Land. Nash’s images feature few human figures, in part because the men were underground. Alternately, we might read the bumps in the landscape as gestures to, if not direct indication of, the men shallowly buried beneath. The archaeological fantasy of discovering bodies buried in tombs seems strangely metamorphosed in the trenches, where, Nash writes, ‘In the midst of this strange country […] men are living in their narrow ditches hidden from view by every cunning device.’35 As Anthony Bertram argues, ‘That is the centre of Nash’s truth about the war landscape: that man’s presence in it was something we could never forget precisely because we could not see him.’36 In this confusion of categories and spaces, men who should be above ground are instead beneath the surface, while the dead are ‘cast up’.37 What should be kept below the surface is, uncannily, brought to light. Investigating the ways in which war landscapes and archaeological sites both shaped the emergent discourse of the uncanny helps us see how Victorian archaeological fantasies are reshaped to apprehend the crises of modern war. For another example, consider the small helmet floating in the murky white water of The Menin Road.38 A helmet is neither new nor alien, and is instead quite familiar and unfrightening on its own. However, placed in a landscape nearly void of men, other than two figures barely distinguishable from the trees, the helmet suggests what the viewer would wish to ignore—​that its owner is likely buried in the rubble or drowned in the mud.

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Figure 4.2  Paul Nash, We Are Making a New World, 1918. (Imperial War Museum, London, UK)

Thousands of men did actually drown during the Third Battle of Ypres.39 It was the aftermath of this extended struggle which Nash witnessed firsthand and copied in his sketches, which later shaped his paintings. The floating helmet corresponds to what contemporary public archaeologist Gabriel Moshenska calls the ‘archaeological uncanny’: For many archaeologists and perhaps the majority of the interested public, the past is not inherently alien and unfamiliar but is rendered thus by the archaeological process. The uncanny lies in the act of digging up, not in the property of being buried … [I]‌t is the excavation and revelation of [the material remains of the past] in contexts of burial and decay that alienates them and creates a sense of the uncanny.40

The helmet in The Menin Road is an excavated object, brought to the surface of the water as if it were an ancient relic. The transformation of very contemporary objects into seeming relics points to the temporal confusion of what Wyndham Lewis—​co-​founder of the Vorticist movement and Great War artist—​retrospectively called the ‘battle-​bog’ of Passchendaele.41 In his visual depictions, Nash reproduces the strangeness of bodies and objects

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Figure 4.3  Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919. (Imperial War Museum, London, UK)

alternately buried and revealed by the mud of the battlefield, and the corresponding sense of intense familiarity and alienation. Lewis’s designation of the ‘battle-​bog’ of Passchendaele suggests another way to read representations of muddy battlefields as examples of the archaeological uncanny. In Bodies in the Bog (2009), which explores twentieth-​ century receptions and appropriations of corpses ‘mummified’ in bogs and found throughout northern Europe, Karin Sanders devotes a chapter to ‘The Archaeological Uncanny’. While in Sanders’ words bog bodies ‘would seem to be “poster children” for Freud’s theory of the uncanny’, Freud was relatively uninterested in, even annoyed by, these strange finds. Sanders suggests that Freud’s antagonistic response to the bog bodies arises from certain facets of his own archaeological imagination—​namely, the somewhat single-​ minded valuation of artefacts of the classical past for establishing routes of aesthetic and moral progress.42 ‘In contrast to this’, explains Sanders, ‘a perceived sense of Nordic crudeness made it difficult for it to be seen as rivaling the grandeur and nobility of classic Greek-​Roman or Egyptian antiquity.’43 Sanders continues, ‘Unlike the “civilized” Roman and Grecian past, the northern bogs appeared both shallow and bottomless and dark—​or, to borrow from Gaston Bachelard’s psycho-​phenomenology, “the desire to dig in the earth immediately takes on a new aspect, a new duality of meaning, if the ground is muddy.” ’44 Despite Freud’s dismissal of the bog bodies,

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their simultaneous foreignness and uncomfortable familiarity embodies his understanding of the uncanny, and Sanders does note the irony of Freud’s dismissals of the abject corpses in light of his own research on repression. The problem with bogs, claims Sanders, is that unlike classical archaeological sites, ‘bogs do not provide a stratigraphy filled with traces of previous civilizations, nor did bogs (to [her] knowledge) yield little figures for Freud’s desk’.45 This absence of stratigraphy speaks to the muddiness cited by Bachelard, and provides a conceptual link to Nash’s representations of the uncanniness of the war. Bogs, and the bodies preserved within them, negate categories, violate boundaries, and corrupt conventional processes. In a similar way, representations of the war emphasise the often appalling ways modern warfare dissolved boundaries—​ between above and under ground, life and death, the human body and the earth. These theorisations of the uncanny by Freud, Moshenska, and Sanders, offer ways of seeing Nash’s war images and descriptions as invoking the discourse of the archaeological uncanny to mediate the shocking transformations of the war, and to understand man’s place in a seemingly alien geographical, historical, and temporal location. The boggy mud of the battlefield colours Nash’s art and life ​writing in even more material ways. In his letter from 13 November 1917, Nash claims that ‘the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green white water, the roads & trucks are covered in inches of slime’, emphasising the transmutation of natural elements through their violent collision with modern warfare. Similarly, ‘[B]‌lack dying trees’ are made to ‘ooze & sweat’—​suggesting an unsavoury melding of plant life, technology, and bodily fluids. As part of this battlefield dissolution of boundaries, the trench mud made its way into the media of Nash’s work. Telling Margaret that his drawings are ‘all done in my brown paper book because they are all mud landscapes’, he muses: ‘Yesterday the hun rendered me material assistance by dropping a shell about a dozen yards away & splashing my drawing with mud just where I wanted it—​an engaging piece of realism.’46 In its near delight at the suggestive possibilities of amalgamating medium and content, this reference recalls the evocative presence of ‘mummy brown’ in Victorian painting. Ground mummy was used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a pigment for both oil paint and glazes. Its colour, though variable, was a light brown with sometimes a grey tinge, and was famously used by Lawrence Alma-​Tadema, whose paintings often engaged with Egyptian, Pompeian, and Roman archaeological imagery and material.47 Nash’s excited reference to muddy realism reveals how he conceptually linked the materials of his ruined landscape with the aesthetic forms they created.

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For Nash, the natural world—​trees in particular—​was connected with, even an extension of, the human. In a 1912 letter to the poet Gordon Bottomley, Nash wrote, ‘I have tried … to paint trees as tho they were human beings … because I sincerely love and worship trees and know they are people and wonderfully beautiful people.’48 During his first stint on the Western Front, he describes the country to Margaret: ‘Imagine a wide landscape flat and scantly wooded & what trees remain blasted & torn naked & scared & riddled […] a slope rises to a scarred bluff the sort of which is scattered with headless trees standing white & withered hopeless of any leaves dumb, dead.’49 What might seem to be an error, Nash’s description of the trees as ‘scared’ rather than ‘scarred’, is in keeping with the overall personification of trees in his writing, which invites us to read his war-​torn landscapes in connection with the maimed bodies of men. Wire (1918–​19), We Are Making a New World (1918), Void (1918), and The Menin Road (1919) all feature the savaged trees. The red sky of We Are Making a New World eerily gestures to the massive blood loss in a war in which over 41,000 British men alone had at least one limb amputated.50 According to Cork, the red sky in this painting makes the scene appear ‘as if all the blood spilled on the Western Front had coagulated on the horizon and threatened to choke nature altogether’.51 The severed tree-​limbs also gesture to the uncanny, and look forward to Nash’s later experimentation with tree-​like limbs in a collection of illustrations for a quite remarkable book. Just over a decade after the war, when his paintings were established as some of the most iconic images of the crisis, Nash was approached in 1932 by Desmond Flowers on behalf of Cassell’s Publishing House. He was offered the chance to illustrate any book of his choosing. Nash provided thirty illustrations for a new edition of Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus, edited by John Carter and printed on J. Bucham Green’s handmade paper. In one of these illustrations, ‘Funeral Pyre’ [Figure 4.4], neatly, almost perfectly arranged logs compose a pyre, their edges precisely cut.52 In front of the flame-​licked pyre, a severed hand rests on the ground. The hand is pristine, undecayed and unburned, and like the logs on the pyre has been precisely severed. The resemblance between the logs and the hand, and their almost uncanny geometrical slices, suggest an effort to render abstract and thereby sanitise through distance the kind of brutal realities of war amputation. The frightening agency of mummy hands in late-​Victorian romances, like Queen Tera’s hand in Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, or the hand of Ma-​Mee kept lovingly in Smith’s pocket in Haggard’s ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’—​severed female limbs that speak to the simultaneous romance and threat of female sexuality—​are transfigured through the violence of war into familiar yet alien appendages, uncanny tokens that speak to the war’s confusion of boundaries between human and inhuman, life and death.53

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Figure 4.4  Paul Nash, ‘Funeral Pyre’, illustration for Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus, edited by John Carter, 1932. (Washington University in St Louis (MO, USA), Special Collections)

Nash’s revised trees and hand in his illustrations for Hydriotaphia point to how the archaeological uncanny continued to shape his aesthetic endeavours during his transition into more surrealist pieces. In ‘Browne and Paul Nash: The Genesis of Form’, Philip Brockbank suggests that the reason

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for Nash’s turn to Browne might be inferred from We Are Making a New World—​‘that ironic epigraph to desolation’.54 In the 1920s and 1930s, according to Brockbank, ‘Nash was endeavoring to transcend the irony’—​ the mode of representation that Fussell has established as the dominant marker of Great War literature. He explains: ‘What Nash saw in Browne was a common preoccupation with the generation of form out of void, of order out of decay, of life out of death […] Nash, turning to Browne, recovered from the seventeenth century that confidence in the processes of generation that was later proclaimed in his final paintings.’55 Like the many Decadent and Modernist artists who found in Urn Burial inspiration for experimental prose, Nash, according to Brockbank, turns to the archaeological tract in search of reassurance and of something new—​‘generation of form out of void, of order out of decay, of life out of death’.56 The exceptionally sanitised and orderly ‘Funeral Pyre’ illustration suggests that in his effort to transcend irony, Nash transforms the gruesome corpses witnessed in the war and the trees that ‘ooze & sweat’ into more surreal and abstracted forms. In his writings from the 1930s and in images of decontextualised objects planted in various landscapes, Nash might be seen as an archaeologist of the imagination. His approach to what he calls ‘Unseen Landscapes’ in a 1938 essay anticipates in some ways the ‘ideational landscapes’ described by contemporary archaeologists. Nash writes of ‘stones, bones, empty fields, demolished houses, and back gardens’.57 ‘[A]‌ ll these have their trivial feature, as it were their blind side; but, also, they have another character, and this is neither moral nor sentimental nor literary, but rather something strange and—​for want of a better word, which may not exist—​ poetical.’58 In Nash’s work with Browne, he moves away from direct representations of landscapes and scenes of quasi-​archaeological ruin to consider the forms of objects themselves, transitioning his work from the war into his later surrealist works in which groups of objects are placed within a landscape. Indeed, in several of his illustrations of Browne’s tombs, artefacts, and corpses, Nash shifts towards the surreal, anticipating his later landscapes filled with decontextualised pieces, and his later writings on inanimate objects and stones. In tracing Nash’s engagements with prehistoric landscapes, corpses, and archaeological objects from his pre-​war images through to his later works, we trace his development as an artist. In ‘Tokens’ [Figure 4.5], Nash represents a collection of artefacts described by Browne as contents of some of the burial urns. Brockbank claims that these tokens ‘remain objects in a sepulcher, exposed to the archaeologist’s inquiring eye’ and points to their ‘uncertain shadows, both actual and symbolic’.59 Despite the worms interspersed throughout the image, the tokens are indeed laid out for display, clean and orderly, without evidence of decay. Nash’s

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Figure 4.5  Paul Nash, ‘Tokens’, illustration for Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus, edited by John Carter, 1932. (Washington University in St Louis (MO, USA), Special Collections)

drawing organises the individual items for consideration as objects. The pure white bone appears again in the text’s following smaller image, where it threads through one of the two shiny gold rings, a worm through the other. Though depicted with a background of dirt, the cleanliness of these

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images, particularly the pristine white bone, look forward to Nash’s paintings in the 1930s of what he called ‘bleached objects’. Additionally, these images anticipate Nash’s fascination with fossils or ‘l’objet trouvée’, which Nash describes in an essay entitled ‘The Life of the Inanimate Object’ (1937) as ‘any object we may discover for ourselves’.60 In another illustration for Hydriotaphia, entitled ‘Ghosts’ [Figure 4.6], Nash reproduces a strange seascape of sorts. Jellyfish (one of which on the right appears to have a section of spinal column) hover alongside a floating head, and a spirit drifts on a staircase to nowhere. Nash’s fascination with the sea suggests that like the surface of the earth itself, under which the dead and their relics are constantly uncovered, the sea shallowly conceals its own mysteries. Part of this otherworldly menagerie is a decayed tree, which in its features resembles a human body. The tree is unlike the full, rounded trees in Nash’s pre-​war works, and, despite being dead, does not resemble the thin stumps in his war images. Instead, the trunk resembles the monoliths and uprooted trees Nash was interested in during the 1930s. Browne’s meditation on the archaeological encounter seems to have spurred this reconsideration of form. Marsh Personage, for example, a section of dead tree Nash pulled from a stream and exhibited at the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, demonstrates a new way Nash conceived of the connection between trees and people. Simon Grant argues that the piece ‘was as much an image of a dead body as it as [sic] a natural piece of Surrealist art’ and compares it and the bleached trees Nash wrote about to ‘the skeletons of fallen soldiers’.61 While the connectivity between trees and human bodies in his war works resulted in horrific associations of amputation, Browne’s discussion of ghosts in Hydriotaphia perhaps inspired Nash’s vision of dead trees in a ghost world—​generation and order out of destruction. The tree in ‘Ghosts’ certainly anticipates Nash’s essay ‘Monster Field’ (1939) in which he addresses ‘monster objects outside the plan of natural phenomena’—​in this case, two trees destroyed reportedly by lightning and thus bleached ‘dead white’ in a field: ‘What reference they have to life should not be considered in relation to their past—​therein they are dead—​they now excite our interest on another plane, they have “passed on” as people say.’62 Grant argues that when the Second World War struck, it had in some way been ‘prefigured’ for Nash: ‘In contrast to the immediacy of his First World War work, he soon began to think about the war as having an “unreal dream-​ like complexion.” ’63 Nash’s illustrations for Browne’s Hydriotaphia aided his transition into his surrealist works of the Second World War. Though somewhat dismissive of archaeology’s historical and scientific purposes, Nash turns to Browne’s stylistically experimental meditation on the archaeological encounter in a continued effort to recover from and mediate and

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Figure 4.6  Paul Nash, ‘Ghosts’, illustration for Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus, edited by John Carter, 1932. (Washington University in St. Louis (MO, USA), Special Collections)

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the war, restoring the relationship between life and death while innovating new aesthetic forms. In Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape, art historian Kitty Hauser argues that most critical works on Nash and ancient landscapes ‘over-​stress the formal appeal of ancient objects—​like Stonehenge, or Avebury—​without acknowledging that it was equally the fact of their longevity and their presence in the landscape that endeared them to Neo-​Romantics like Nash’.64 These accounts, she claims, ‘overlook the importance of the temporal and spatial frame in and through which prehistoric and historic sites and objects were seen—​a frame that was ineluctably modern. What appealed as much as the formal or ideological significance of these things was the very fact of their survival; their inherence in the landscape, despite modernity’s best efforts.’65 My discussion here shares in correcting some of this oversight by demonstrating how for Nash, the spatial and temporal frame of ancient landscapes was in a sense transportable: the battlefields of the war could never be Wittenham Clumps, but those ancient hills certainly shaped Nash’s rendering of No Man’s Land—​a place in which modernity’s best (or worst) efforts made sure the original landscape did not inhere. The forms of prehistoric landscapes and archaeological objects certainly played a major role in Nash’s aesthetic development, and their historical and temporal associations inherent in these landscapes also shaped Nash’s writings and depictions during and after the war—​aiding him in the creation of an archaeological uncanny warscape and in the eventual aesthetic transcendence of the war’s horrors. Hauser describes the importance of prehistoric geographies for Neo-​Romantics: ‘The past is not something with which these artists sought to commune, as a sort of refuge from modern life—​or at least it is not only that. It is perceived as something which is not past at all, but is embedded within modern life.’66 To render the violent collision of modern warfare with the past, Nash appropriated archaeological sites and themes, embedding prehistoric landscapes and archaeological sites in his modern warscape. By tracing Nash’s appropriation of prehistoric landscapes and structures through his concern with archaeological encounters more broadly, we see Nash’s later pieces emerging as part of an under-​examined trajectory. In his repeated efforts to transplant prehistoric landscapes and forms to make meaning of modernity’s most frightful incursions, Nash practices an imaginative archaeology, reshaping fin-​de-​siècle fantasies of the archaeological encounter for the crises of the twentieth century.

Victorian Pompeii in the First World War Nash’s representations of the battlefield reveal another archaeologically relevant trope in first-​hand accounts of the war—​a connection between the

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war’s technological violence and the natural disaster of volcanic eruption. In a letter to Margaret from 6 April 1917, Nash describes the scene in terms that recall volcanic disaster: ‘The earth rises in a complicated [?]‌eruption of smoke and bits to fall for yards wide splashing into the pools flinging up the water rattling on the iron sheets spattering us & the ground near by.’67 Well before the First World War, writers and artists mediated military violence and the shock of industrialisation through volcanic imagery. In Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–​1884, Seth Reno establishes the prevalence of volcanoes across literature, art, and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Violent eruptions and subsequent processes of erosion, decay, and rejuvenation not only inspired writers to imagine a geological time scale for the first time—​that is, ‘deep time’—​but also made volcanoes a major attraction for natural historians and tourists alike. At the same time, many poets and novelists began using geological language and volcanic imagery in depictions of industrialization. They linked the hellish flames of industrial factories to the geophysical force of volcanic eruptions. In doing so, these authors conflate human and geological phenomena, presenting humans as geophysical agents in a new industrial epoch.68

For writers and artists like Nash, who were often especially invested in the war’s impacts on the landscape, the visual correlations between the ‘hellish flames’ of volcanoes and those of industry likely seemed ready-​made for representations of modern warfare. Additionally, though Reno establishes a concept of the Anthropocene developing well before the twentieth century, First World War witnesses were deeply concerned with ‘humans as geophysical agents in a new industrial epoch’. As discussed in my introduction, the continued activity of Mount Vesuvius alongside the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century prompted an increased interest in the famous eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Nicholas Daly claims that these concurrent movements focused attention ‘on the collision of the volcano with humanity, the moment of destruction and preservation’.69 In the early nineteenth century, writers turned from pyrotechnic spectacles to the more personal effects of volcanic destruction at Pompeii and Herculaneum, tragedies that seemed to prefigure in some ways the catastrophe of the Great War. In a letter composed on 23 December 1915, British Lieutenant J.W. Gamble, compares the warscape and its future to that of Pompeii’s past and present. Gamble claims that the Ypres ‘will be flooded with sight-​seers and tourists after the War, and they will be amazed by what they see. The ancient ruins of Pompeii and such places will be simply out of it.’70 By inviting comparisons between the front and Pompeii’s archaeological wasteland, these figures imply that the war of modern technology has devastated nature in a way that before only nature itself could accomplish. Similarly, in 1915, Australian journalist Louise Mack published a memoir entitled A Woman’s

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Experiences in the Great War. Having travelled to Belgium to write articles for the Daily Mail, Mack describes the Flemish city of Aarschot following its brutal destruction by the German army: ‘In the pouring rain, wearing a Belgian officer’s great-​coat, I trudged along through a city that might well have been Pompeii or Herculaneum; it was a city that existed no longer; it was absolutely the shell of a town.’71 Mack’s narrative features the spectacle of a war-​torn town, with ghostly streets and corpse-​like buildings, turning to the volcanic destruction of ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum to represent the ruin of industrial warfare. She declares that the inhabitants of Aarschot ‘have fled, leaving their lares and penates just as the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum sought to flee when the lava came down upon them’.72 She imagines the town’s inhabitants leaving their household gods behind in an ultimately doomed attempt to escape. In another example, a Professor Gilson at the Belgian University of Leuven describes the city as a ‘smoking heap of ruins’: Houses are caved in, nothing remains but smoking ruins, and a mass of brick. It is a veritable Pompeii. But how much more tragic and vivid is the sight of this new Pompeii! An oppressive silence everywhere. Everybody has fled; at the windows of cellars I see frightened faces, and at the street corners Prussian sentinels, sordid, immovable and silent.73

Gilson’s letter envisions a transposition of Pompeii’s archaeological site onto his beloved city, modern civilians gazing out of ruined homes and ‘Prussian sentinels’ like stern, immovable ghosts. Importantly, the narratives and images from which these writers draw are very much creations of the century preceding the war, a century which featured extensive excavations of, and tourism to, Pompeii. Victorian appropriations of Pompeii and Herculaneum—​civilisations viewed as remarkably modern, and suddenly struck down in a storm of fire, ash, and poison gas—​resonate powerfully in representations of an industrial war which devastated cities and left millions of men dead in the mud. Writers during and after the First World War turn often to Victorian appropriations of Pompeii and Herculaneum to mediate the war’s traumas. By exploring how Victorian adaptations of Pompeii infuse wartime literature and art, we can uncover how such adaptations shape our own historiographies of Pompeii, of Victorian archaeological tourism, and of the Great War itself. Perhaps the most prominent narrative of Pompeii’s destruction in Victorian Britain was Edward Bulwer-​Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, which, at the time of its publication in 1834, was the second best-​ selling novel in the world behind Walter Scott’s Waverly.74 Vesuvius had erupted again multiple times, including in 1834, just months before the

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publication of Bulwer’s Last Days, no doubt fuelling its success. Bulwer had only a handful of textual sources for reference in writing his novel. First-​hand accounts of the eruption of Vesuvius are confined to two letters from Pliny the Younger, written to the Roman historian Tacitus. Bulwer also made use of Sir William Gell’s Pompeiana, first published in 1817, and again in an expanded two-​volume set in 1832. Bulwer was also inspired by visual representations by John Martin and Karl Briullov.75 But, rather than relying entirely on these precedents, Bulwer bases much of the plot and the book’s characters on his own experiences with the material remains of the city, reconstructing personalities and events from the evidence left behind. For example, in a passage from the final pages of the novel, he writes: In the house of Diomed, in the subterranean vaults, twenty skeletons (one of a babe) were discovered in one spot by the door … There were jewels and coins, candelabra for unavailing light, and wine hardened in the amphorae for a prolongation of agonized life. The sand, consolidated by damps, had taken the forms of the skeletons as in a cast, and the traveler may yet see the impression of a female neck and bosom of young and round proportions—​the trace of the fated Julia!76

Allowing readers to imagine themselves exploring the ghostly city, Bulwer points out like a tour guide the material remains of the story just told. The reader has just followed Julia, the mother and her baby, and a group of enslaved people into Diomed’s house, where they had believed themselves protected.77 Bulwer continues in this passage to catalogue the findings of archaeologists, referring familiarly to the names of characters in the previous pages—​‘the houses of Sallust and Pansa, the Temple of Isis’, and ‘the skeleton of a man literally severed in two by a prostrate column’—​ the final image of the tale’s villain.78 This tactic is woven throughout the novel, including extensive descriptions of the House of the Tragic Poet (excavated in 1824), which belongs to Bulwer’s Greek dandy protagonist Glaucus. Bulwer’s genre-​bending narrative, mixing archaeological evidence with romantic fiction, pervades this and other textual and material reconstructions of Pompeii in the nineteenth century. Shelley Hales addresses this textual device, explaining that it helped position Bulwer’s novel as an ‘intermediary between past and present’.79 ‘In fact’, she claims, ‘aided by Lytton, the enveloping effect of the ruins of Pompeii regularly caused such a time-​ slip, presenting a place where the ghosts of a lost past were ever present. The jarring of the modern voice and ancient narrative in The Last Days of Pompeii was not just a didactic device but typical of the many novelists and artists who all felt the collapsed distance between past and present in

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the city and imagined the city’s ghosts interacting with visitors.’80 Though Bulwer’s novel was a best-​seller in the 1830s, William St Clair and Annika Bautz have shown that it wasn’t until between 1890 and 1900 that, with the publication of hundreds of thousands of cheap paperbacks, Last Days ‘reached mass readerships’.81 Thus, Last Days enjoyed its largest reading public in the decades just preceding the war. Bulwer’s narrative draws from and creates several tropes that become central to the Victorian narrative of Pompeii, and which Great War writers later adopt to navigate the contradictory realities of the First World War. Here, I will focus on four tropes of Pompeiian disaster and rebirth (examined in depth by Virginia Zimmerman in the fifth chapter of Excavating Victorians), which, I argue are then re-​appropriated during and after the First World War. First, Bulwer’s novel obviously appeals to the common fascination with Pompeii’s last days—​the drama of civilised people, suddenly, unknowingly struck down in the middle of their everyday lives. Zimmerman explains the role of nineteenth-​century narratives in shaping such a dramatic memory: ‘While, in fact, Vesuvius spewed smoke and ash for days before its spectacular eruption, giving most people a chance to flee Pompeii in good time, the narrative related throughout the nineteenth century features a sudden, surprise explosion that caught the citizens of Pompeii unawares and petrified them forever in their tracks.’82 In addition to the tragic final moments of his characters, Bulwer is also focused on afterlives—​the ways in which archaeological discovery permits victims and their stories to live on. Third, his novel engages with the amplified significance of quotidian artefacts. Because of the unique and unintentional nature of the preservation of Pompeii, the private and banal artefacts of the individual survived alongside, or instead of, the public and political. Zimmerman’s work demonstrates that the ‘relics of domestic, quotidian life’, rather than public monuments, interested Victorian archaeologists and writers most at Pompeii, and that their accidental preservation lends them ‘a disproportionate value’.83 And finally, Bulwer’s novel is literally constructed through archaeological tourism. Victorians visited Pompeii in large numbers on the Grand Tour; they dressed up in togas, ate candlelight dinners in the homes, and envisioned the lives of individuals whose belongings were left behind.84 Now named dark tourism or thanatourism, this branch of tourism involving visits to sites of death and atrocity, has extended to the battlefields of the First World War. In part through these tropes, which appeal to Great War writers, Victorian Pompeii narratives like Bulwer’s ultimately help to shape the Great War’s enduring mythos of tragic irony. In Marcel Proust’s seven-​volume novel In Search of Lost Time (1927), the final days and eventual destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum appear several times as parallels of Paris during the war. In the final

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volume, the narrator Marcel walks with the character Charlus through the streets of Paris during an air raid. Charlus provides an extended meditation on Paris-​as-​Pompeii during the war, beginning: Social amusements fill what may prove, if the Germans continue to advance, to be the last days of our Pompeii. And if the city is indeed doomed, that in itself will save it from frivolity. The lava of some German Vesuvius—​and their naval guns are no less terrible than a volcano—​has only to surprise these good people at their toilet and to eternise their gestures by interrupting them […]85

Like spectators of pyrotechnic shows saw in the violence of eruption an analogy for the French Revolution, Proust turns to Vesuvian lava to describe the power of Germany’s advanced weaponry. He appropriates the tragic paradox of bodies ‘eternised’ through their annihilation—​referring to the body-​shaped vacancies in the ash at Pompeii, and to the plaster casts created in 1863. Like many nineteenth-​century writers who represented the destruction of Pompeii as punishment for its paganism and decadence, Proust’s Charlus suggests that Paris’s destruction, should it come, would at least save it from its own artificiality.86 Importantly, Paris–​Pompeii parallels are not unique to Great War literature. Francesca Spiegel recognises the focus on ‘the futility of keeping up appearances and having a good time just before a cataclysm’ addressed by Charlus as a sort of ‘ideation [that] had been current to Proust’s epoch ever since the (still relatively recent) experience of the Franco-​Prussian war (1870–​1)’.87 Additionally, Proust’s narrator, according to Spiegel, ‘finds his Paris similar to the Directoire Paris of 1795–​9, no doubt also a “frivolous” period, and again reflecting the fact that these links between Paris and Pompeii had a long cultural history’.88 France’s long history of failed revolutions, and the cynicism instilled by such historical experience, perhaps fuelled the desire to find historical partners in ruin and rebirth. Following the passage above, Charlus imagines future children gazing at pictures in their schoolbooks of wealthy Parisians engaging in frivolous cosmetic activities, like ‘Sosthène de Guermantes adding the final touches to his false eyebrows’: [T]‌hese things will be the subject of lectures by the Brichots of the future, for the frivolity of an age, when ten centuries have passed over it, is a matter for the gravest erudition, particularly if it has been embalmed by a volcanic eruption or by the substances akin to lava which a bombardment projects. What documents for the future historian if asphyxiating gases, like the fumes of Vesuvius, and the collapse of a whole city, like the catastrophe which buried Pompeii, should preserve intact all the imprudent dowagers who have not yet sent off their paintings and their statues to safety in Bayonne!89

Proust’s character here turns to the Vesuvian narrative of destruction, preservation, and rebirth to envision Paris’s future. This method of envisioning

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the future through the frame of Pompeii’s archaeological rebirth appears in earlier Victorian texts. For example, A Punch article entitled ‘London in A.D. 2346’, published in 1846, reports the future archaeological findings in what was once Trafalgar Square, which had been destroyed by the eruption of a Mount Vesuvius.90 As the Punch article’s directness suggests, some writers were able to find a dark humour in comparisons with Pompeii. Proust’s Charlus evades the pathos of Bulwer’s narrative in favour of something more detached (note, he is pro-​German), and Spiegel reminds us that ‘Proust’s depictions of life in all its ugliness and ridicule suggest comedy rather than tragedy.’91 In Proust’s passage, the pompous academic character Brichot is imagined to have a future self who studies the frivolous and banal activities of then-​ancient Paris. The narrator continues this reflection, implying that the inhabitants of Paris have resembled the Vesuvian victims for at least a year as they anticipate their destruction. Suggestively using the term ‘fragments’ in his archaeologically tinged meditation, he notes: ‘[H]‌ave we not already seen fragments of Pompeii every evening: people burying themselves in their cellars, not in order to emerge with some old bottle of Mouton Rothschild or Saint-​Emilion, but to conceal along with themselves their most treasured belongings, like the priests of Herculaneum whom death surprised in the act of carrying away the sacred vessels?’92 This meditation recalls Bulwer’s tragically ironic Pompeiians, absconding into Diomed’s cellar with the jewels and coins that would later be discovered near what remained of their corpses; even the wine appears in this passage, as it did in Bulwer’s as ‘wine hardened in the amphorae for a prolongation of agonized life’. The archaeological rebirth of the Vesuvian cities, at the very least, suggests the possibility of some kind of future in which, despite its flaws, a civilisation earns the respect of future scholars. And yet, in Spiegel’s reading, Proust’s Paris–​Pompeii comparison is not so much about apocalypse as it is about ‘the end of an old order’.93 The parallel between the cities is part of the work’s more expansive obsession with the cyclical nature of history, with the recurrence across time of human habits, behaviours, and destruction. Proust’s narrator continues to ruminate on the human desire to protect our objects, even in the face of extinction: True, Paris was not, like Herculaneum, founded by Hercules. But how many points of resemblance leap to the eye! And this lucid vision that is given to us is not unique to ourselves, it has been granted to every age. If I reflect that tomorrow we may suffer the fate of the cities of Vesuvius, these in their turn sensed that they were threatened with the doom of the accursed cities of the Bible. On the wall of a house in Pompeii has been found the revealing inscription: Sodoma, Gomora.94

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Charlus here refers to what is often simply called the House of Sodom and Gomorrah, excavated at Pompeii in 1858 and 1869. Inscribed in charcoal on a house on the Via dell’Abbondanza, this reference sparked a great deal of debate over the possible presence of Jews and Christians in Pompeii during its destruction.95 The Biblical cities famous for their punishment are both central to Proust’s work—​literally forming the middle (fourth) volume, entitled Sodom and Gomorrah—​and vital to a transhistorical parallelism that extends through Pompeii and into First World War Paris. Spiegel argues that Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah image is ‘a Pompeian vision, invested with a knowledge that seems to be more Proust’s than that of the Pompeians themselves; that is, the idea that life recurs in cycles and that forms of life and behaviour are continuous across epochs and societies. For Proust, people, faces, and character traits all return with time.’96 The historiography offered in these comparisons is one of tragicomedy, or critical aloofness. Charlus, according to Spiegel, ‘does not care that the world is ending; instead, he claims disinterested appreciation of its beauty’.97 Proust and his characters must adopt a more detached, comparative approach to history, one focused on cyclicality, to arrive at any kind of closure. These older apocalyptic destructions—​brought about by God himself or natural disaster—​are the only apt parallels to the devastation of the Great War. The kinds of historiographies they offer, though, are anything but nationalistic, imperialistic, or didactic. Comparing Paris to Pompeii, and through Pompeii to Sodom and Gomorrah, is messy, cynical. In the face of the end of an old order, and the birth of a vague, unsettling new era, the aesthetic appreciation for destruction might be the only helpful perspective. Like other writers before and after him, Proust finds some comfort, or at least transhistorical community, in bearing witness to the spirit of imminent-​total-​destruction as actually shared among consistently fallible people across time. Those Parisians hiding in their cellars are in good company—​or at least, company. My reading of Proust has clearly relied heavily on Spiegel’s, in part because of her recognition of transhistorical parallels in fiction as a kind of archaeological historiography. But what is also significant about Spiegel’s work for my larger argument is its extension of this archaeological epistemology outside of the text and onto the reading process. Spiegel envisions Proust’s readers as archaeologists ourselves. While Charlus speculates on a future in which Parisians are studied by archaeologists as his contemporaries study Pompeii, Spiegel maintains, ‘It might be said that students of Proust interested in social portraiture are just such archaeologists, since Proust has, under the pretext of telling the reader about his vocation as a writer and his discovery of things transcendent, created tremendous social frescoes.’98 While my first

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chapter argues that through their engagements with the detritus of the past and unconventional digging practices, Wilde, Lee, and Forster invite readers to undertake queer archaeological readings, this final chapter considers how both Great War writers and we who study them appropriate archaeological reading practices in our continuing historiographies of the war. Proust’s multivolume opus, In Search of Lost Time, offers direct allusions to, and (often shallowly buried) evocations of, the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as its aesthetic and historiographical connections to the more ancient destructions of Sodom and Gomorrah. Interspersing these references throughout his work, including a more poignant designation of the central volume as Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust invites readers to uncover history’s repetitions, finding familiar faces and crises in the annals of time. Modernist writer H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] likewise envisions the war’s effects on the modern city, and that city’s future discovery, through the destruction and rebirth of Pompeii. In her novel Asphodel, written in 1921, the narrator meditates on Londoners’ shocked realisation that the planes flying low in the sky over the city are not their own, but are German planes bombarding the city with poisonous gas. Unlike Proust’s Charlus, H.D.’s narrator offers a perhaps more sincere and tragic consideration of the war’s damage. Her text exhibits how the violence of modern war has destroyed art and realised the most brutal banalities. The narrator alludes to Walter’s Pater’s famous reflection on the Mona Lisa in The Renaissance, and to a poem by Algernon Swinburne, to suggest that the war has ruined art itself: ‘[A]‌nd prose and poetry and the Mona Lisa and her eye lids are a little weary and sister my sister, O fleet sweet swallow were all smudged out as Pompeii and its marbles had been buried beneath obscene filth of lava, embers, smouldering ash and hideous smoke and poisonous gas.’99 Like Proust, H.D. compares modern weaponry to volcanic disaster, burying the beautiful things and effectively ending a civilisation’s existence—​for the time being. Additionally, H.D. here presents a sly transvaluation of Decadent aesthetics. While Pater’s vampiric Mona Lisa and Swinburne’s poetry are iconic initiates of late-​Victorian Decadence, H.D. suggests that the violence of war is far more ‘poisonous’ and ‘filth[y]’ than the art and literature often denigrated through these terms. Before pondering London’s eventual excavation from beneath the rubble of war, the narrator asks, ‘Was London still there?’ It was hard, would be hard to find it. Some of them might be left, there might be an afterwards and then some of them would get to work and dig, dig deep down and unearth all the old treasures […] Those things were being buried and all they could do was to watch, to stand in little groups and knots and after all with the volcano belching its filth over them, they were all one, must be all one.100

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The war has transformed London almost beyond recognition. What might remain of it will be, according to the narrator, buried ‘deep down’ to be unearthed in the future, like some repressed or protected memory. The citizens of London can only cluster in groups to watch their things buried by the filth of war, with only a subtle hope of an ‘afterwards’ when they will be unearthed, a process that will render them ‘old treasures’, just like at Pompeii. Indeed, Victorian and Great War writers demonstrate a heightened focus on reading everyday domestic artefacts anew. For example, an 1852 article in Household Words references the contents of a Pompeiian cupboard then displayed at the Museo Burbonico, including soap, sponges, and wax, and declares: ‘the value of small things; the worthlessness of great ones’.101 Similarly, Charles Dickens writes in Pictures from Italy of ‘lamps, tables, couches; vessels for eating, drinking, and cooking; workmen’s tools, surgical instruments, tickets for the theatre, pieces of money, personal ornaments, bunches of keys found clenched in the grasp of skeletons, helmets of guards and warriors; little household bells, yet musical with their old domestic tones’.102 This heightened value of the banal at Pompeii recalls the archaeological value of rubbish I discuss in my first chapter, though at Pompeii this added value derives from the unique preservation of such trivialities. Paul Nash’s visual art and life w ​ riting also evoke this concern with everyday objects and the lives they can only begin to record. The helmet in The Menin Road recalls the significance invested in quotidian items discovered at Pompeii—​note, ‘helmets of guards and warriors’ appear in Dickens’s list—​and corresponds to the archaeological uncanny. However, the floating helmet also recalls the legend of the Roman sentinel of Pompeii. Excavations in the late eighteenth century uncovered the skeleton of a man with a lance in his hand near the city gate, inspiring writers like William Gell, Mark Twain, and Bulwer to imagine a Roman soldier who refused to leave his post as the city fell. An exhibition of these remains at the Museo Burbonico in 1851 included a Roman helmet, fuelling the legend, along with Edward Poynter’s 1865 painting of the soldier, entitled Faithful Unto Death. While the Roman sentry legend has by now been dismissed, the image of a helmet left behind looks forward to, and perhaps informed, Nash’s The Menin Road. Additionally, Zimmerman has argued that ‘[t]‌he unusual nature of its relics made Pompeii a fitting subject for a developing form of historiography’. As archaeology developed as a discipline in the nineteenth century, material remains grew more significant to the practice of writing history. Zimmerman continues: In addition to altering the practice of history, these objects invited people of traditionally marginalized classes and professions into the historical narrative […] I argue that Pompeii reveals the Victorian interest in a form of

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culture that interests the postmodern reader. Pompeii offered a culture of lower-​and middle-​class men and women leading regular lives. For a historian interested in the relics of daily life, Pompeii is the sine qua non of archaeological finds. It presents the nonliterary but vividly telling texts of graffiti, ticket stubs, and an endless array of personal and domestic effects.103

Zimmerman offers a focused case study of one of the larger claims of this book—​that not only in Pompeii (and Herculaneum), but throughout archaeological discourse, imagery, and methodology, writers at the long turn of the century found ways of giving voice to silenced and marginalised figures in history, seizing upon the unique qualities of archaeological materials to craft new and even dissonant historiographies. In 2015, construction for a housing development began near Boult-​sur-​ Suippe, a French village located along what was in the war the Western Front. When archaeologists arrived to survey the site, they discovered the remains of approximately 530 German soldiers.104 While protocol required deceased soldiers to be buried without their equipment, tags, and personal materials, the graves at Boult-​sur-​Suippe contained all of these items. Such extensive remains allow archaeologists access to personal details, pointing to ‘the value of small things’ at Great War sites. Brown University archaeologist Jason Urbanus claims, ‘An excavation such as this one is difficult, but its value lies in the ways in which the manner and style of each soldier’s burial can allow archaeologists to discern what befell each individual on their last day.’105 This statement itself—​which inspired the title of Urbanus’s article in the popular magazine Archaeology, ‘A Last Day, Reclaimed’—​recalls the nineteenth-​ century fascination with narrating Pompeii’s final days. Urbanus sounds much like Austen Henry Layard, who in 1864 describes the famous plaster figures at Pompeii, ‘We have death itself moulded and cast—​the very last struggle, the final agony brought before us. They tell their story with a horrible dramatic truth that no sculptor could ever reach.’106 Ancient Pompeii seems to haunt us as we uncover in Great War battlefields the stories of men’s final moments. Through archaeological discovery, the secrets, achievements, and last days of everyday people can be brought into and reshape the historical narrative. Lieutenant Gamble’s supposition that the Great War battlefields would be ‘flooded with sight-​seers and tourists after the War’ turned out to be true. British tourism of battlefields in France began very shortly after the war. Thomas Cook—​an English travel agent who had helped thousands of Victorians plan their trips around the world, including to Pompeii—​ organised the first trips to the Western Front in 1919.107 While Great War archaeological tourism has not quite reached the extent of tourism to Pompeii, recent excavations have uncovered human remains and artefacts

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that compel a response strikingly similar to Victorian reactions at that more ancient site. In fact, just as ancient Pompeii was accidentally discovered during a sixteenth-​century construction project, battle remains from the Great War have often been uncovered by accident. Urbanus explains that archaeologists investigating France’s extremely deep prehistory ‘would occasionally find their progress interrupted by the presence of World War I material’.108 Ironically, archaeologists in search of prehistory stumble upon the remains of an industrial war which, to many of its witnesses, appeared to stall time entirely, to recall the ancient and prehistoric itself. The layers of significance in Great War allusions to Victorian representations of Pompeii are perhaps appropriately, anachronistically, captured by one of Bulwer’s characters, the villain of The Last Days of Pompeii, who asks in 79 AD: ‘[H]‌ast thou never in this dark and uncertain world … hast thou never wished to put aside the veil of futurity, and to behold on the shores of Fate the shadowy images of things to be? For it is not the past alone that has its ghosts. Each event to come has also its spectrum—​its shade.’109 For witnesses of the Great War and even contemporary archaeologists, the devastations of the war seem somehow prefigured in the devastation of Pompeii, and its afterlife haunted by the narratives Victorians constructed from its remains. The allusions to Pompeii addressed in this brief interlude serve as a kind of case study, demonstrating how writers looking to historicise the war incorporated a large time span to facilitate their understanding of this as yet another apocalypse—​one which would be recorded in its material culture and effects on the landscape. For figures like Nash and the writer I consider next, even more ancient landscapes and mythic pasts offer themselves up to facilitate experimental representations of the war, and suggest ways of, at least aesthetically, transcending the war’s trauma.

Mary Butts and the ‘War-​fairy-​tale’ In ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, a four-​part essay published in The Bookman between January and April 1933, Mary Butts110 refers to ‘a neolithic earth-​ work in the south of England’, which she refuses to name, explaining, ‘The fewer people who pollute that holy and delectable ground the better.’111 Referring cryptically here to the Badbury Rings—​an Iron Age earthwork in east Dorset composed of three concentric ringed mounds surrounding a small forest—​she states, ‘The writer of this essay discovered it when young; and it is no exaggeration to say that a great part of her imaginative life was elicited by it and rests there.’112 Her biographer Nathalie Blondel affirms, ‘The importance in Mary Butts’s imagination of these three concentric prehistoric

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rings surrounding an ancient pine wood can-​not be overstated.’113 As evidenced throughout ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’ and in her autobiography, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns (1937), Butts believed that she uniquely communed with the past and its surviving landscapes—​an initiate into the secrets and sensations embedded in primeval topographies. As an extension of this identification with prehistoric spaces, Butts evidently felt herself intimately connected with archaeology. In ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, she explains, ‘Archaeology had begun to interest me, but I knew none of its stories then. It entered into me, “accepted” me.’114 Andrew Radford claims that ‘Butts considered herself an “imaginative archaeologist” positioned at a cultural crossroads: keenly responsive to the dislocating complexities of modernity, yet driven by a historical responsibility to recall and reanimate ancient traditions.’115 Although Butts did not consciously seek out archaeology, it found and ‘entered’ her in a way that shaped her writing. A modernist who has received relatively limited scholarly attention, Butts wrote poetry, short stories, novels, reviews, pamphlets, and an autobiography. She circulated with such major modernist figures as James Joyce, Roger Fry, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford, but according to Roslyn Reso Foy in Ritual, Myth, and Mysticism in the Work of Mary Butts: Between Feminism and Modernism (2000), ‘she remained on the edges of any one “group” ’.116 Blondel argues that Butts’s death in 1937 before the Second World War and ‘the fact that her exuberant and often dramatic social life concealed her dedication to her writing’ account somewhat for her disappearance from scholarship through the mid-​twentieth century until some of her works were republished in the 1990s as part of a larger endeavour to recover neglected women writers.117 A small body of scholars from a range of fields have addressed Butts’s work, including cultural historian Patrick Wright, cultural geographer David Matless, and literary critics such as Foy, Radford, Blondel, Jacqueline Rose, Ruth Hoberman, and Sam Wiseman, approaching her texts from a variety of perspectives. This range of approaches to Butts’s writing should suggest its multifaceted appeal: her work is formally experimental, playing with temporality and perspective in ways that situate her beside more canonical modernist writers; it engages in distinctive ways with the interwar geo-​political moment; and as her appeal to cultural geographers intimates, it explores natural landscapes with a unique perception of their layers of temporal, personal, and cultural meaning. Scholars have generally read Butts within the context of twentieth-​ century literary and cultural modernism and as part of the British interwar neo-​romantic movement that turned to regional beauty as a palliative for the agonies of industrial warfare and urbanity. Butts’s sense of communion with the prehistoric landscape, while certainly situated within interwar

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neo-​romanticism and European literary modernism, can also be read productively through two specific and uniquely related discourses: archaeology and the popular rhetoric of the Great War. Reading Ashe of Rings (1925), Butts’s life ​writing, and two of her post-​war essay series—​‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’ and ‘Warning to Hikers’ (1932)—​through her singularly feminine archaeological imagination, I demonstrate how Butts represents ritualistic encounters with the prehistoric landscape in an effort to recover from, and even expiate, the violence of war, re-​shaping the discourse of war itself.

Mary Butts, archaeology, and the Great War As suggested by her jealous guarding of the Badbury Rings, Butts’s appreciation for the ancient landscape often manifests in her works with an attitude of exclusion and elitism. In ‘The Enchantment of Place: Mary Butts, Wessex, and Interwar Neo-​Romanticism’ (2012), Radford addresses Butts’s interwar fiction and her 1932 pamphlet essay ‘Warning to Hikers’—​a diatribe on the growing popularity of middle-​class excursions from the city to the countryside. He argues that while Butts was obviously deeply involved in interwar neo-​romanticism, she is missing from much of the scholarship on the topic because of ‘a flaw in her feminist and patriotic agenda’—​namely, the fact that her work ‘converts the interwar fascination with a critical and imaginative regionalism into a form of racial mythologising, dependent on bellicose rhetoric that scorns an array of class and ethnic “intruders” ’.118 For example, addressing the ‘cult of nature’ in ‘Warning to Hikers’, she laments the point at which ‘the cult widens down until it reaches the people of fake sensibility’, members of the middle and working classes to whom she refers as ‘new barbarians, bred inside that hideously fabricated world’.119 In On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (2009), Wright discusses Butts’s investment in the idea of a ‘real’ England, which, ‘formed on the recoil from a modernity gone mad, … is articulated against the lies of urban pastoralism with its cultural sources in Tennyson, its sentimental reading of Wordsworth and its deep ignorance of what Mary Butts knew to be the really authentic measure of the land’.120 As Radford, Wright, and nearly every critic of her work recognise, Butts’s custodial claims upon the English countryside are frequently classist and even eugenicist, characterised by ‘intolerance’ towards strangers and even a ‘punitive political agenda’.121 Yet scholars like Wiseman have identified complexities and contradictions in Butts’s representations of the layered landscape. Wiseman argues in The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism (2015) that her ‘engagement with the landscape … is at least in part about a challenging of boundaries, sexual or otherwise, and the embrace of cosmopolitan diversity’.122 I am most interested in how Butts enacts these challenges to boundaries, ‘sexual

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or otherwise’, through a uniquely feminine, and perhaps feminist, archaeological imagination—​a way of perceiving and transmuting the traumas of modernity through women’s bodies, particularly through the ritualistic encounters of those bodies with and in a stratified landscape. Butts’s complex mixture of exclusion and boundary-​dissolving are rendered formally in what Foy calls her ‘sibylline prose’, which jumps frequently among various perspectives and features countless fragments and literary allusions.123 While modernists rallied to create radical experimental forms, Butts’s style stands out within modernist endeavors, according to Blondel, because its innovations remain ‘in the service of story-​telling’ and ‘because of its particularly allusive and elusive mingling of the contemporary with the classical, the literary with the everyday, the expected with the unusual’.124 Foy suggests that Butts’s work encouraged readers to ‘reevaluate incomprehension’—​as the physical sciences were simultaneously introducing ‘a way of looking at the new by reinterpreting the old, shaped by self and consciousness’—​ and argues that Butts’s fiction does so ‘through the use of myth, the magic of ritual, and the spirituality of mysticism’.125 Similarly, identifying her work as written in a ‘high European modernist style’, Matless claims in ‘A Geography of Ghosts: The Spectral Landscapes of Mary Butts’ (2008) that it ‘calls up an authentic green English world through myth and ritual, magic and ghosts, a modernism of ritual held to restore truth against an artificial modern culture’.126 My reading focuses on what Matless calls Butts’s ‘modernism of ritual’, or how she makes sense of the modern by reinterpreting the old and delving into the complex interactions between the two. In the texts examined here, Butts turns to women’s ritualistic engagements with the prehistoric landscape to mediate, offer solutions for, and transcend aesthetically the crises of modernity, particularly the temporal and sexual traumas of the First World War. The return of the heroine of Ashe of Rings to her familial estate, her ritualistic communion with its prehistoric site, and her recovery of an inheritance that had been denied to her suggest ways to repair modernity’s fracture with the ancient past and symbolically recover the future for a lost generation. In ‘Warning to Hikers’, an essay that may seem on its surface disconnected from the war, Butts ponders what happens when visitors from the cities (the eponymous and detested hikers) drift further into the unknown. She notes ‘how quickly, in the friendliest country, the most loved, described, harvested or defiled, the land will become again a no-​man’s land’.127 Readers in 1932 could not have ignored Butts’s use of the phrase ‘no-​man’s land’. The association between the unfamiliar land just outside of the familiar and the ‘no-​man’s land’ of the war gestures to the uncanniness of the front and suggests that any wild landscape might transform into the front of a war, depending on how it is treated. She continues in this pamphlet to analogise

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nature as an agential force, evoking not only the landscapes of war but also war’s destruction through references to body parts: ‘Nature lies like a hand open with the fingers loose for man to run about the palm; dig into the pure flesh and build a palace or sewer or a desolation of his contrivance. The palm is his earth, the fingers are what he does not see, nor understand that they can move, curve in and grasp him and make the palm a gulf, and all his works no more than a fertiliser for its flesh.’128 Butts envisions the earth itself as one large hand that over vast spans of time will respond to its own injuries. In part an overly fervent effort to frighten city-​dwellers away from her favourite English sites, Butts’s striking image suggests that nature—​the hand—​will avenge the damage done to it by modern technology—​the ‘desolation of [man’s] contrivance’. The first industrial war exposed the barbaric potentials of technology created in the name of progress—​technology that left nearly an entire generation of men dead in the mud. Butts’s passage suggests that the war is only one example of how the natural world, especially when desecrated, will respond to human interference, absorbing it violently into its own interminable processes. Butts’s image of nature as an open hand functions as a rhetorical device. Inviting readers to consider extreme lengths of time in which the war was but an episode, Butts urges communion with the landscape to prevent the closing of nature’s fist—​the warning signified in the pamphlet’s title. As Butts turned to ancient places and structures in her creative efforts to understand, represent, and transcend the war, her fear of the despoilment of beloved landscapes shaped her attitudes towards archaeology. As a result of her concerns about violating the natural world, Butts had conflicted responses to archaeological infiltrations of the landscape. Despite her somewhat dismissive attitude towards archaeological empiricism, however, Butts’s writing exhibits a complex ‘archaeological imagination’, which Hauser theorises as ‘a perceptual matter, a way of seeing’.129 Butts’s works participate in archaeological discourse through their preoccupation with the stratification of landscape and with the personal and historical significance of layers of occupation. Butts revels in ancient survivals beneath modernity’s surface, which Radford attributes to her ‘infinitely stratified sense of place’.130 Butts claims in her autobiography, The Crystal Cabinet, ‘even under Fleet Street the Fleet is running yet. And the earth is strong’, demonstrating a sensibility that modernity is composed of multiple layers of temporality, resting always on something very old and powerful.131 Butts perceives modernity and the deeply ancient past as somehow contemporaneous in a given space. In Hauser’s formulation, ‘The archaeological imagination [unlike history] does not reconstruct an absent past, but reveals a consciousness of the ineluctable and material immanence of the past within the present.’132 For Butts, who believed herself spiritually linked with the

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Badbury Rings and initiated into ‘a secret concerned with time and very little with death […] the link between time and eternity’, the remnants of prehistoric structures throughout the countryside represented a noble past hovering within or below a menacing modernity.133 In fact, in The Crystal Cabinet, Butts suggests that the cataclysm of the Great War somehow compacted and de-​familiarised more recent history, bringing modern people into closer contact with a deeper past: ‘It is a good fortune of this generation—​ one of the things we may be fairly said to have got out of it—​that the gulf the war opened behind us has given us the simultaneous possession of two worlds at once. We—​it must have been the same for the people who lived through the Terror and the Protectorate—​have lived in two ages.’134 The war stalled a belief in progress that had characterised the more recent past, as the advancements of technology brought about only ruin. Estranged from proximate history and brought into closer contact with more ancient times, Butts looks to prehistoric landscapes to understand modernity and recover from the violent temporal fracture impelled by the war. Butts’s archaeological imagination leads her to understand the relationship between the landscape and humans as dynamic and often, as in the nature’s fist analogy, to envision the landscape as a responsive body. This understanding facilitates parallels in her works between the war’s wreckage of the human form and the corresponding devastation of war on the land. In The Crystal Cabinet, Butts describes modernity’s impact on its ‘victim, the lamb of the green earth, its throat arched to the knife. Sacrificed to what we politely call “the play of free change” in a world hurling itself into new forms […] racing, unchecked towards the conditions we are now beginning to see in all their horror, their potentiality for evil. A catastrophe of which the war was but an incident.’135 War, and modernity more broadly, is a bad archaeologist, destroying the earth in a backwards and futile attempt to recover political ground and colonise the future. What concerns Butts about war—​the desecration of the natural world—​also concerned her about archaeological excavation. Just as the war transforms beautiful country scenes into hellish settings and industrialisation renders natural landscapes victims to ‘the play of free change’, archaeology is capable of voiding the spirituality of ancient places. Taking advantage of the similar crises of archaeological and military encounters, Butts uses each kind of experience to explore the other. In the section that follows, I apply this understanding to Ashe of Rings, addressing the relationship between its central site—​the estate of Rings—​and the cultural moment of the Great War. I then investigate how Butts uses this prehistoric landscape to intervene in the shifting discourses of femininity prompted by the war. In the last section, which addresses the final conflict between the novel’s two major

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female characters, I underscore the novel’s subversion of popular rationales for the war’s catastrophic violence.

Ashe of Rings, a ‘War-​fairy-​tale’ Although set and partly written during the war, Butts’s novel Ashe of Rings was only partially serialised in The Little Review in 1921 and not published as a whole until 1925 in Paris and America. It was not published in England until 1933. The work stages a battle of good and evil over the ground of a prehistoric Dorset earthwork. Blondel claims that Ashe of Rings ‘combines realistic and fantastic elements in a linear narrative which defies temporality by aspiring to a condition of myth’ and ‘retrieves what was destroyed by the First World War’.136 Personifying the war in the novel’s necrophiliac villainess, Butts offers in opposition another feminine type who is inspired by British mythic priestesses and characterised by her connection to the ancient landscape. Seeking to transmute the horrors of modernity, Butts’s novel also revises the popular war rhetoric of sacrifice and heroism through its representations of ritual engagements with the ancient site. In her female characters’ extreme relationships to modernity, the war, and the mythic past, Butts re-​negotiates the discourses of gender and sacrifice that the war transformed, drawing from the multilayered significations of the prehistoric landscape to manage the psychic and temporal fragmentation brought forth by the war. In the novel, the central conflict revolves around the characters’ engagements with a prehistoric earthwork referred to only as ‘the Rings’, three concentric circles of raised earth with a barrow in the top ring and a grove of trees in the centre—​quite evidently based on Butts’s beloved Badbury Rings. The Rings are part of the estate of the noble Ashe family. The family’s spiritual devotion to the site, an altar stone in the midst of the trees, and the Rings’ extreme antiquity signal its mystical properties. Part one of the novel takes place in 1892, while parts two and three are set in 1917. In part one, Anthony Ashe, the patriarch of the family, marries a local woman, Melitta, in order to produce an heir. Anthony and his new daughter, Vanna, are rightful heirs to the mighty ancient landscape, while Melitta and several other characters misunderstand or even violate the Rings. Melitta commits adultery with a neighbouring landowner, Morice Amburton, on the Rings shortly before Anthony’s death. Melitta gives birth to Valentine Ashe, whose true paternity remains in question until later in the story. Melitta then marries Amburton. Vanna departs for school, becoming even more estranged from her mother and her brother, who has usurped Vanna’s inheritance. Part two jumps to London in 1917, where the war’s civilian

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hardships (such as food shortages) and her gradual disinheritance have left Vanna semi-​impoverished, living with a woman named Judy, the novel’s central villain. The women spend time with Serge, a Russian runaway and painter with whom Judy is in a manipulative and dangerous sexual relationship. Judy eventually leaves Serge to become engaged to Peter Amburton, Vanna’s cousin. At the novel’s climax, all of the characters converge at Rings. Vanna triumphs over Judy and Peter on the top of the earthwork, repairs her relationship with Valentine and Melitta, and reclaims her rightful inheritance of Rings. In her 1933 afterword to Ashe of Rings, Butts calls the novel a ‘War-​ fairy-​tale’.137 Though responding to twentieth-​ century industrialization and the war, Butts’s story, with its fragmented, densely allusive, and often liturgical style, reads as mythic. Shortly after Anthony’s death, Melitta’s sister claims, ‘I think we are living in an enchantment’, and explains, ‘I mean that we are spectators of a situation which is the mask for another situation, that existed perhaps [in] some remote age, or in a world that is outside time.’138 Butts here asks us to read the novel’s domestic events and relationships as representative of a larger, more expansive narrative. The conflict at Rings is a ‘mask’, a fairy tale, illuminating ‘another situation’—​ perhaps the war’s violence and the struggles to overcome it. Though Butts never experienced the horror of the front, she nonetheless registered the devastation of the war. In a diary entry from 12 February 1928, she writes: ‘I belong to the war-​ruined generation; those years lie like a fog on my spirit, mud, slough of despair, cynicism, panic.’139 Butts sees her entire generation in ‘ruin’. Her description of the war’s lasting emotional effects also recall the mud of no man’s land, suggesting that the materials of warfare have infiltrated her language. Butts writes in her autobiography, ‘It is the most wistful of all speculations what life would have been like if there had been no war […] how blessed it would seem, how full of possibilities of achievement. How many—​and this is the worst of all—​dead or maimed in body and spirit would now be at the height of their ripened powers.’140 These reflections indicate a futile desire to undo the damage of the war, a desire she pursues in her work through innovative form and a mythic landscape that ‘defies temporality’. For Butts, certain locations could ‘be two places at once’. She claims in ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, ‘In the past certain holy spots, caves and “temenoi” were, at one and the same time, a place on this earth; a place where once a supernatural event had happened; and a place where, by luck or devotion or the quality of the initiate, it might happen again.’141 The Rings in Ashe of Rings operates as such a place, where supernatural events may occur, depending on the presence of a particular initiate—​often, in Butts’s

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works, a role fulfilled by young women. In her afterword to Ashe of Rings, written fifteen years after the war’s end, Butts implies that in the immediate aftermath of the war, even ‘respectable’ young people were drawn to the fringes of time and space in search of truth: ‘It may be hard to believe now that respectable young women practised evil witchcraft. Or that, apart from the chances of battle, young men felt themselves devoted to death. Yet they did. Or even that other women, though this perhaps was more common, remembered their antique priestesshood of life.’142 In the climate in which Butts wrote the novel, young people looked to restore a sense of self through realised connections with a deeper past. The fictional space of Rings contains trans-​temporal magical potential and provides a canvas for Butts to make meaning out of the fragmented realities of modernity and the Great War. By setting much of her so-​called ‘War-​fairy-​tale’ near the prehistoric landmark, Butts offers a way to reckon with the catastrophe of war in the fullness of time. At Rings, characters experience a singular, disconnected relationship to time and historical context. Shortly after their marriage, as Anthony and Melitta sit inside the house, a clock strikes the hour: ‘the bronze note of a clock rang, like a body falling bound into deep water. Within the house followed a burr, a tinkle, a humming, breaking with cross beats into the same sequence.’143 Anthony asks Melitta, ‘Can you feel […] now time is made sound and we listen to it, and are outside it? Have you thought what it is to be outside time?’144 Beyond the more direct reference to the sounds made by the clock, Anthony seems to suggest that by marrying him and coming to Rings, Melitta has been initiated into a different relationship with time. To be linked with the Rings is to be outside of time, attached to a more expansive temporality and extensive history in which the passing of hours, while final—​‘like a body falling bound into deep water’—​registers as ‘a tinkle, a humming’. Additionally, the legendary crucifixion of an Ashe ancestor at Rings took place, according to Anthony, ‘Once upon a time’.145 A fictional county history document, excerpted throughout the first part of the novel, lauds the fact that the Rings ‘have remained in the preservation of so ancient a family’. Anthony, however, ‘knew better. The Rings preserved him.’146 For British readers encountering this novel in 1933, the patriarch’s knowledge that the ancient landscape preserves him points to a deeper, spiritual past outside of modern legal ties and ownership. By the 1930s, fervent efforts to preserve ancient sites in Britain had been underway for decades while paradoxically ancestral homes were being destroyed.147 The Rings can thus be understood as a timeless presence and witness to the world’s events, a site at which pressing modern questions might be answered or transcended.

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‘The war’s smallest doll’ and ‘the word is made flesh’: Women’s bodies at Rings In the second volume of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1989)—​a three-​volume work structured around the language of war, particularly the Great War—​Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore what they see as the misogyny underlying much Great War literature, including works by Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and D.H. Lawrence, among others. In Gilbert and Gubar’s study, the men’s war was also a revolution for women, as women were suddenly thrust into the workplace and public sphere, taking on roles that they often found exhilarating. Gilbert and Gubar suggest that misogyny was in part a backlash to women’s empowerment: ‘Can this [misogyny] be because the war, with its deathly parody of sexuality, somehow threatened a female conquest of men? Because women were safe on the home front, is it possible that the war seemed in some peculiar sense their fault, a ritual of sacrifice to their victorious femininity?’148 The implied answer to these questions—​ importantly emphasising ritual and sacrifice, to which I will return in the final section of this essay—​is yes. The war produced among its countless horrific dismemberments many genital wounds as well as the psychological traumas known as shell shock, both of which threatened deeply held concepts of masculinity and virility. Civilian women in factories, enjoying relative independence for the first time, actually produced the weapons of war that engendered the soldier’s literal and figurative emasculation. Gilbert and Gubar point to ‘the gloomily bruised modernist antiheroes churned out by the war’ who suffered from these types of wounds, ‘as if, having traveled literally or figuratively through no man’s land, all have become not just no-​men, nobodies, but not men, unmen’.149 The maiming of men’s bodies and minds in the Great War and the simultaneous empowerment of women who took on more vigorous positions in the workplace assailed traditional sex and gender roles and transformed representations of the body itself.150 Butts makes use of the transformed discourses of the human body and femininity and, in Ashe of Rings, fictionalises two types of femininity those discourses helped to shape: the femme fatale and the goddess. At the fin de siècle, romance writers H. Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, Richard Marsh, and Bram Stoker turned to the archaeological imagination to uncover powerful ancient Egyptian women, participating in debates about modern femininity through mummy-​ like femmes fatales such as Ayesha, Ziska, and Queen Tera.151 Similarly, Butts turns to the prehistoric English landscape, unearthing its mythic past to recover empowering roles for women and respond to the war’s transformation of gender discourse. Butts was quite familiar with the femmes fatales of Haggard. In ‘Ghosties

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and Ghoulies’, she lauds Haggard’s works, including her ‘youth’s best-​seller and even now reprinted—​She and its sequel, Ayesha’.152 Butts’s Ashe of Rings takes the fin-​de-​siècle femme fatale to war, seizing the deathly associations of the corpsy villainess and bringing them into the twentieth century. Throughout the novel, Judy is not merely compared to the war; she is depicted both as an embodiment of modern war and as a practitioner of deeply ancient evil. Vanna tells Judy, ‘You’ve been mixing yourself up with some devil’s hocus-​pocus; going bad the way people do sometimes in the tropics. And the years we are living through have stirred the same thing up here’, recalling Butts’s claim in the afterword that the war impelled young women to turn to witchcraft.153 Before the characters converge at Rings for the novel’s climax, Serge visits Judy and watches her ‘stepping before the long glass, smiling, humming. To and away from the glass she slipped, delicately swinging and pointing a small sickle-​knife.’154 In a strange act of solitary foreplay, Judy dances with a knife before a mirror. Judy is, according to Foy, ‘calling up her demons, and symbolically she castrates Serge’ with a knife ironically also associated with the harvest.155 The scene also recalls Isaac Rosenberg’s poem ‘Daughters of War’ (1917), in which the speaker reflects: I saw in prophetic gleams These mighty daughters in their dances Beckon each soul aghast from its crimson corpse To mix in their glittering dances. (lines 6–​9)156

Butts’s Judy practices a ‘glittering dance’ like the dancers of Rosenberg’s poem, hiding the knife before she thinks Serge sees her. This ritualistic dance revives a magical prop of the mythic past to manifest modern war’s particular evils and perversions, foregrounding the destructive aspect of the feminine. The frightening combination of sex and violence likewise brings out the violence in Serge. Earlier in the novel, after an argument in which Judy belittles Serge for shirking the war, Judy runs to Serge and bites his wrist. He then throws her down and holds her on the sofa: ‘His blood smeared her face and her sleeve.’ Walking away from her afterwards, he looks back and sees her ‘still on the floor, sucking the blood from her sleeve, evoking an evil spirit’.157 Judy is aroused by the blood she has spilled, and Serge refuses to escape the sadistic sexual relationship, thinking, ‘You came with the war—​ you are inside me, playing its infernal tunes. You are the war’s smallest doll. You are the war.’158 Implying a reversal of gender roles, Serge claims that Judy has somehow penetrated his mind and body, where she plays the evil music of war on a loop. Though Serge has escaped conscription, he is willingly trapped in a sexual relationship with what he conceptualises as the war itself. Judy’s embodiment of the war’s timeless violence and its perverse

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demands for human life are paralleled in her representation of ancient, dark magic. Foy suggests that through the drawing of blood, ‘Judy initiates Serge into the blood ritual/​sacrifice of her own private cult.’159 Foy argues that Serge ‘is caught in her spell and allows himself to be drawn in as far as she desires; he is both attracted to and repulsed by her and her actions just as human beings are attracted to and repulsed by war’.160 Later, in a conversation between Vanna and Serge, Vanna claims: ‘In the world, Serge, the normal aim of its creatures, is towards birth or making things […] but there are people whose impulse is abnormal, who are attracted to not-​making and to spoiling; to the other side of life, to what we call death’161 (pp. 148–​149). Vanna continues: ‘Consider the war. Have you known anyone who loves the war as Judy loves it? Stoop then and wash. She dips her tall, white body in the blood and rolls it in her mouth, and squeezes it out of her hair […] Am I clear? There is the war. There is Judy and her kind. The individual state bred the general state, that bred the catastrophe.’162 Continuing the erotic language with which other characters connect Judy to the war, Vanna depicts her languidly bathing in the war’s violence, soaking up and releasing blood. Judy here not only resembles the women in Rosenberg’s poem, who delight in the suffering of men, but appears to have bred the war itself. She is one of the type who are ‘attracted to’ death. The materials of war likewise seem to fuel Judy, and Butts’s representations of her villainess gesture to prominent Great War poetry. Sitting in a restaurant on a date, ‘Judy pushed forward her glass for wine. Preening she drank, and the hot bubbles stabbed her gullet, and she swallowed thorned steel. They ran down her body hissing, searing, and she gulped again at the warm air, diaphanous with smoke.’163 Judy drinks the components of combat. The ‘thorned steel’ evokes barbed wire; the ‘hot bubbles stab[ing] her gullet’ suggest tear gas and the ‘blood /​Come gargling from the froth-​ corrupted lungs’ (lines 21–​22), described by the speaker of Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ (1920).164 The smoky air she gulps recalls the ‘chemic smoke’ of Rosenberg’s ‘Dead Man’s Dump’ (line 51) (1917), the ‘acrid smoke’ of Frederick Manning’s ‘Grotesque’ (line 6) (1917), or any number of references to the smoke of shell explosions.165 Judy gulps in these violent essences, nourished by what has destroyed millions of men. Her body takes in the war and likewise deals it back out. The necrophilic undertones of fin-​de-​siècle romances by Haggard, Corelli, Marsh, and Stoker are in this later work cruelly transmuted by the horrors of war. Beautiful undead women with flimsy garments—​like Haggard’s Ayesha or Stoker’s mummy, Queen Tera—​pursued by living male paramours become, in Butts’s novel, sadistic women pursuing and feeding on the wounds and deaths of their male lovers. The alluring femme fatale of Haggard is transformed through

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the war. Trysts in tombs are traded for lonely deaths in mass graves, while women gain pleasure and sustenance from the violent ends of men. Judy’s intimate bodily relationship with the war pervades the text. Closely following the description of Judy drinking wine, the text states: ‘But she prayed, no more than Van—​Cut off my feet in the red shoes.’166 Judy’s prayer refers to Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Red Shoes’ (1845) in which a girl is cursed for her vanity to dance in her red shoes forever. The girl has an executioner cut off her legs, and the shoes continue to dance with her legs in them. This already grotesque fairy tale is made monstrous in reference to the Great War in which over 41,000 British men alone had at least one limb amputated.167 Whether Judy prays to be rid of her obsession with war and savagery or whether she musingly notes the futility of such a prayer is unclear. Regardless, Judy sees the war as opportunity. Pondering how to secure a life with Peter Amburton, a wounded war veteran and Vanna’s cousin, she thinks: ‘It’s the life. For women like me. Ours is the kingdom, the power and the glory […] The war makes it easy. The war’s going to make me Lady Amburton.’168 In excerpting a line from the Lord’s Prayer, Judy alludes to a sort of spiritual and political coup by women. She menacingly delights in the transfer of power lamented by the speaker of Sassoon’s ‘Glory of Women’ (1918), in which women voraciously absorb tales of male heroism, ignorant of or unfazed by the terrifying realities of battlefield deaths.169 Butts’s Judy both profits by, and is, the war. She describes Peter as ‘a shell-​shocked lump of carrion’ whom she can marry to ‘re-​establish [her] family’.170 Whereas Haggard’s Ayesha dreams of ruling an empire with her beloved, Judy feeds on the blood of men, delighting in the carnage of war for its own sake, as well as for what it can get her. In contrast to this bellicose villainness, Butts offers an alternate type of femininity in the savior of Rings, Vanna. In Vanna, Butts exhibits a distinctly old–​new femininity drawn from a wide mythography. Unlike Judy—​who thrives in the city on modernity’s and the war’s most devastating products and who fails to understand the Rings—​Vanna was baptised in a pagan ceremony to the earth, water, and fire, and dubbed ‘bird of Rings’, for whom ‘the arrows of the sun, the arrows of the moon and rain, were ribbons to keep her upright’.171 She can hear the Rings calling to her and tells Serge, ‘I am Ashe of Rings.’172 Vanna is one of several fictional female custodians in Butts’s oeuvre. Radford explains that in her works, ‘young aristocratic women emerge as mythical pantheists, genetically blessed guardians of the darkly inscrutable “dragon-​green” spaces who intervene in, and refresh, the nation’s mythical and patriotic archives’.173 Before Vanna’s birth, Anthony compares Melitta to ‘the Ephesian Artemis. She of the Hundred Breasts’ and asks her, ‘Do you not understand the link between yourself and a great

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goddess—​the type of all things which a woman is or may become?’174 While Melitta does not understand that link, her daughter does and successfully takes possession of her birthright, inheriting the site’s mystical relationship to ancient femininity. The Ashe family, explains Anthony to Melitta, ‘are a priestly house, like the Eumolpidae’—​a group of ancient priests who honored the Cult of Demeter and celebrated the descent of Persephone into the underworld.175 Vanna has thus been born into a unique communion with mythic female goddesses through the landscape of Rings, and like Demeter and Persephone, she experiences physical and spiritual intimacy with the natural world. Butts’s creation of a goddess figure, indebted to a range of mythic women, also draws inspiration from the writings of the nineteenth-​century classicist Jane Ellen Harrison. Radford argues that Butts ‘construes Harrison’s anthropological endeavour as consistent with her own—​to transmute the “primitive” from an irretrievable developmental phase in the history of civilisation to a more rewarding mode of being’.176 According to Radford, ‘In [Butts’s] opinion, Harrison stripped away the seemingly antiquarian and hidebound discourses of Hellenism to establish dissident configurations of gender and sexuality.’177 Butts refers to Harrison’s Prologomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1908) in ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, claiming that this work presents ‘the natural history of so many of our beliefs, in bogy, ghost, daimon, demon, angel or god’.178 In the Prologomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Harrison explores the family dynamics of ancient Greek deities and suggests that the primitive goddesses demonstrate matriarchal rather than patriarchal succession: ‘Hera, subject in the Homeric Olympus, reigns alone at Argos […] At Delphi in historical days Apollo held the oracle, but Apollo, the priestess knows, was preceded by a succession of women goddesses.’179 She continues to discuss the primitive ‘Earth-​mother’ goddess as depicted on ancient pottery, who ‘bore not only fruits but the race of man’ and was called ‘Lady of the Wild Things’.180 Harrison’s presentation of matriarchal succession in ancient Greek religion likely inspired Butts’s creation of Vanna, who, as ‘bird of Rings’, recalls the ‘Lady of the Wild Things’. Early in the novel we learn that Anthony’s first child, a son named Julian, died before the novel’s events—​the text implying that the Rings disapproved of the child when Anthony says to them, ‘So Julian wasn’t your fancy.’181 It is Vanna who takes possession of the landscape, initially at her birth and again at the novel’s end. In addition to Harrison’s classicism, Butts finds inspiration again in Haggard. In ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, Butts draws attention to Haggard’s ‘sense of the mysterious links and repetitions of history—​Cleopatra strung like her own pearl on a thread of beauty and disturbing power running through man’s history, opening at its dawn with “Heaven-​ born Helen,

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Sparta’s queen.” Reborn, now here and now there, making one feel sure that such happenings and such repetitions are not fortuitous.’182 Like Haggard, whose novel Cleopatra was published in 1889, Butts sees a line of powerful women ‘running through’ male history, and Vanna evinces Butts’s effort to redirect history to a more ‘fortuitous’ route through female priestesses connected to the ancient landscape.183

‘The balance of power’: Great War rhetoric at Rings For many writers, the war and its massive losses called into question long-​ held ideals of heroism and exposed the incapacity of traditional art forms to register those losses. In the preface to his collected poems, published after his death by Sassoon, Owen writes, ‘This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, dominion or power.’184 For writers like Owen and Sassoon, the horrific landscapes and bodies of war broke down traditional paradigms of heroism, sacrifice, and initiation while the landscape in Ashe of Rings reconstitutes these ideals, which the war had rendered trite. Rings takes ideas and gives them form. As Vanna explains to Serge, ‘It is a place of evocation. Where the word is made flesh. That’s too poetical—​I mean a place where the shapes we make with our imagination find a body.’185 Correcting herself for using the ‘poetical’ language others have used throughout the text, Vanna suggests the futility of traditional forms of expression and clarifies that the Rings ‘find a body’ for what the imagination conceives. Additionally, alluding to the biblical verse ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us’, the text implies that the Rings, a site connected to a pagan past, also realises one of the promises of Christianity (John 1:14, KJV). Speaking of Vanna early in the novel, her aunt meditates, ‘And the Word was made flesh—​suppose—​she were the word.’186 The promise of a savior, referred to in the Bible as ‘the Word’, is fulfilled at the Rings, ‘a place of evocation’. While the war took words and concepts like ‘heroism’ and ‘sacrifice’ and broke down their meanings, the Rings takes the abstract and often trite concepts associated with these words and gives them form. In the climax of Ashe of Rings, Judy and Vanna face off, in Serge’s words, ‘at a kind of vortex where extreme life—​that’s [Vanna]—​and extreme anti-​ life—​if that’s Judy, meet’.187 In this scene, Vanna walks late at night to the Rings, where Judy and Peter are waiting for her. Judy confronts Vanna with information she has gained about the sacrificial capacities of the Rings: ‘We’ve found out all about your filthy, mystery-​mongering place’, she shouts. ‘It drinks blood. Give it a drink, and it works. We’ve given it a

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drink.’188 Attempting to manipulate the vague mystical mechanism of the Rings, Judy and Peter have killed Peter’s dog, shedding its blood on the altar stone. Judy sacrifices not herself but another creature, approaching the exchange as a selfish transaction through which she can benefit, much like she approaches the war. It is notable that both the villain of the novel and the Rings ‘drink’ blood—​Judy ‘dip[ping] her tall, white body in the blood and roll[ing] it in her mouth’ and the Rings accepting blood as an offering.189 Soon, Vanna realises that Judy plans to murder her and cries, ‘It is one thing to kill in war […] It is slightly worse to kill me here. If you take my blood, it won’t give you power for ever, and it will be very difficult to explain the corpse. The Rings will betray you, you amateur invocators!’190 Believing in the protective power of the Rings and their loyalty to her, Vanna rushes into the trees towards the stone in the centre. Falling and hitting her head, Vanna spills her own blood on the stone and wipes it with a fern. Resigning herself to death, Vanna lies on the stone, ‘open[ing] her palms to the moon’—​a passage that recalls Butts’s vision of nature itself as an open hand.191 Eventually realising that instead of murder, Judy now plots for Peter to rape her, Vanna thinks: ‘Become part of this place, and they will find only a stone […] The stone is white. The moon is white. I’m white when I have no clothes. He mightn’t see me at all.’192 Removing all of her clothes but her shift, she lies flat on the stone. Vanna’s engagement with the landscape suggests that honesty and vulnerability, as well as being one of the chosen initiates, are necessary requisites for effective sacraments in the modern world. This image strategically echoes the Stonehenge scene in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), in which, the night before her arrest, Tess sleeps on the altar stone. The scene also recalls Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), in which Ursula stands naked beneath the moon—​‘She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it […] She wanted the moon to fill in to her, she wanted more, more communion with the moon, consummation.’193 Vanna is thus one of a string of British earth goddesses in early British modernism, one that demands to be read in the context of the Great War. Vanna sacrifices herself to the prehistoric rings for protection but also, the text suggests, as symbolic redemption for the evils of the war, which are represented through the vicious, bloodthirsty Judy as well as through the injured, corrupted male soldier. This adaptation of the Eucharistic tradition suggests that the novel is concerned with where and how faith is invested in times of tragedy—​how the acts of offering and communion work in a transformed world. The novel advocates a return (by those qualified) to the ancient landscapes that, as Anthony recognised, ‘preserve’ us and that have both witnessed human exploits and suffered human exploitation.

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When Peter returns, ambivalent about his task, he struggles to see Vanna, partially because of the war injury to his eyes but more importantly because of her disappearance into the stone. He says to her, ‘You are lying in something. It’s like a white cup, full of you.’ Peter refuses to touch the stone, exclaiming, ‘It’s alive—​we woke it up earlier. I remember. The dog’s blood turning into a white poison and moving the stone. Oh, God!’194 Frightened of the stone and unable to see Vanna clearly, Peter crawls away. In many ways, this scene could not be more different from the battlefields of war, yet Butts calls our attention to this connection through Vanna’s comparison (‘It is one thing to kill in war’) and through the novel’s invocation of sacrifice. The Rings accept Vanna’s offering and evidently reject Judy and Peter’s, refusing to accommodate their plans to kill or rape Vanna. Instead, Vanna has through some mystical process become one with the Rings, entrusting her body to them and winning their protection. Wiseman argues that Butts’s endeavor to reimagine her native landscape following the ‘cultural and historical break’ instigated by the war often involves ‘emphasizing the landscape’s animistic qualities, its central role within a fictional project that often seeks to undermine boundaries between human and nonhuman life, the animate and inanimate’.195 As I discuss above, the undermining of boundaries between human and nonhuman is a significant trope of Great War literature. In many works about the war, men merged with nature in horrific ways. The speaker of Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ (1914) imagines the buried bodies of proud and patriotic soldiers who died for their country—​a ‘richer dust concealed’—​merging with the land in a ‘corner of a foreign field /​That is for ever England’ (lines 4, 2–​3).196 This romanticised dust would, over the course of the war, be transmuted to mud and slime. One of countless examples of the lasting impact of mud on soldiers is in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–​28), where Christopher Tietjens describes German deserters as ‘moving saurians compacted of slime’.197 Vanna’s merger with the white stone instead presents a beautiful, sanitised version of the mess of war. The fictionalised rite seems to anticipate an idea that Butts elaborates in ‘Warning to Hikers’: ‘There are conquests and familiarities which honour and those which dishonour. In nature there seems to be a power latent to turn our triumphs against us, re-​strike the balance of power when we have prevailed against her in our wars.’198 Vanna’s communion with the altar stone ‘re-​strike[s]‌the balance of power’, correcting for Judy’s dishonourable attempt to manipulate the Rings and repairing in some small way the fracture between humans and nature of which the war was a horrible sign. The mystical, distinctly feminine sacrifice on the altar stone similarly corrects a trope often adopted to negotiate the psychological and practical costs of war. In ‘Imbalances: Mass Death and the Economy of “Sacrifice”

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in the Great War’ (2018), Vincent Sherry examines the proliferation of rhetoric early in the war that aimed to sanctify the deaths of men through the idea of sacrifice. Excerpting the form letter sent to families of deceased soldiers—​part of which reads, ‘His country will be ever grateful to him for the sacrifice he has made for Freedom and Justice’—​Sherry explains, ‘To an order of magnitude unimagined or even unimaginable until now, dead bodies by the millions were given over to the economy of sacrifice for validation and consolation.’199 For many writers, however, the totality of the war and the sheer number of individual sacrifices it demanded eventually rendered the idea of sacrifice null. Concluding his chapter with a reading of Ford’s Parade’s End, Sherry reflects upon the pervasive ‘recognition’ in well-​known war literature ‘that the understandings of sacrifice, whether we think of them as religious or secular, desecrated or devalued, have been disabled on a scale commensurate with that of this First World War’.200 In the context of the war, ‘the destabilizing factor, the figure of greatest significance, is the immeasurability of death, which overwhelms and incapacitates an idea of individual sacrifice as measurable, rational, and so-​effective, which is, all in all, the contract of individual and social progress in post-​Reformation, Protestant modernity’.201 In Ashe of Rings, Butts does not merely protest the newly empty concept of sacrifice; she proposes an alternate model, restoring a more ancient and properly proportioned ‘contract’. Earlier in the novel, Vanna had told Serge of the Rings, ‘You get out of it what you put in. The same as with everything else, only more intensely. That is the first rule of magic, as you ought to know.’202 Vanna echoes Harrison’s discussion of ancient rites and sacraments, a discussion that Butts distills in ‘Warning to Hikers’ into ‘a man took out of them in proportion to what he put in’.203 Whereas millions of men died in the First World War as a roughly theorised ‘sacrifice’ to a cause many did not understand, leaving doubts as to what was ultimately gained, Butts offers instead a mythic version of expiation that makes sense—​‘You get out of it what you put in.’ After the drama at the Rings, near the end of the novel, Serge asks the long-​time butler of Rings whether ‘the war may not have ruined everything’ to which Clavel responds, ‘We have tried to reverse its operations.’204 Vanna’s sacrifice has healed the generational conflict in the Ashe family and won back her inheritance, symbolically reversing, on a small scale, the generational rifts and lost futures of the war.205 The day after the confrontation on the Rings, Melitta visits Judy and Peter to determine the truth about the attack. Though Judy attempts to mislead her, Melitta concludes that Vanna and Valentine (who has stood against Melitta in support of Vanna) were truthful. In a climactic moment of repentance, after hearing Peter’s assurance that ‘the Rings looked after [Vanna]’, Melitta redeems her relationship with her children and with the landscape that has always baffled her,

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declaring silently: ‘Over to Rings. Rings that made me. Rings that gave me clean children. It doesn’t matter that they are different. I am going back to my children.’206 Though Vanna and Valentine had believed each other to be illegitimate and thus that they were unrelated, they now recognise they are both children of Anthony and Melitta, and they share ‘the brilliant intimacy of brother and sister’ as ‘a double-​branched flame, joined at root, parallel at crest; one fire and two’.207 At the conclusion of the novel, Valentine is set to leave for the war, but he assures Vanna that he is ‘not going to die’ and states, ‘When I come of age, we’ll share the world.’208 With the younger generation reassured of their claims on the future and Vanna’s rightful inheritance guaranteed regardless of Valentine’s fate, the novel concludes with a sense of solemn closure and new beginnings: ‘So the spell of Rings was wound up and worked out’, claims the narrator, ‘and the Rings children received the rewards of warriors. Everything was over; everything was beginning again, in the flight of their race and age. Life had justified itself of Melitta, Vanna and Valentine Ashe.’209 The ‘War-​fairy-​tale’ has reached a qualified happily ever after, reshaping the war-​torn discourses of gender, generational inheritance, and sacrifice into a more redemptive narrative.

‘Initiation rites that really initiated’ In ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, Butts writes: Perhaps we shall find ourselves back again where our “savage ancestors” began—​back again to initiation rites that really initiated, so long as you brought something to them: good health; faith; knowledge and goodwill—​to whose men peace was promised. That conception may come round again—​a great wheel turned and ground gained—​to initiations which will really initiate; not by haphazard; not by fraud or hypnosis or superstition, but inevitably. Because we shall know to what further fields of veridical experience they take us.210

The cyclicality of this statement reflects its content: the conviction that the deeply ancient past can renew the present. Despite, or perhaps because of, the devastation and unclear gains of the first industrial war—​the war that in the words of cultural historian Paul Fussell ‘reversed the Idea of Progress’—​ many soldiers saw their experience as a sort of initiation or rite of passage.211 Charles Edmund Carrington, a British Army Officer and Cambridge historian, wrote, ‘We are still an initiate generation, possessing a secret that can never be communicated.’212 In response to this brutal and inequitable initiation of modernity, Butts advises a return to ‘initiation rites that really initiated’, to rituals in which something is given and something is gotten. For Butts, the topology and language of archaeological experience, along with a personal sense that archaeology had ‘entered into [her]’, facilitated literary

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mediation of the war’s traumas. She ruminates on the knowledge that landscapes are inscribed with histories of many scales, some personal and present and some cultural and deeply ancient. In a young woman attuned to her prehistoric landscape, fighting for an inheritance denied to her by an older generation, Butts repairs in some small way the psychic fragmentation and temporal shock of the Great War, retreating from the obscene proportions of the war into a single meaningful act and a mythic past.

Conclusion: A century later—Great War archaeology Before they knew for certain that Great War battlefields would one day be excavated, Paul Nash and Mary Butts experimented in their works with what archaeologists call ideational landscapes. For these artists, the topology and language of archaeological discovery facilitated literary and visual representations of the war, and offered ways to transcend its horrors, aesthetically, psychically, and historiographically. Nash and Butts ruminated on the knowledge that landscapes are inscribed with histories of many scales, some personal and some deeply ancient. Their works demonstrate the truth of the epigraph to this chapter—​that ‘it is the material and psychological immensity of industrialised conflict which embodies the extremes of our behaviours—​from a nation’s production and mobilization of material force, to an individual’s struggle with injury, loss, and despair’.213 From the devastated, uncanny landscapes of Nash’s war letters and paintings, to the ferocity of the war embodied in Butts’s Judy and the prehistoric wisdom of the rings, these artists sought to manage the psychic aftermath of war through sites of deeply inscribed personal, aesthetic, and historical meaning. As we reach a time when living memory of the war is unavailable, attuning ourselves to the archaeological imaginations of Great War writers and artists, some of whom consciously considered their own time and place as subject to future archaeological investigation, can help us discover new and interdisciplinary ways of understanding the war’s ongoing personal, cultural, and aesthetic impacts.

Notes 1 Nicholas J. Saunders, ‘Excavating Memories: Archaeology and the Great War, 1914–​2001’, Antiquity, 76 (2002), 101. 2 Paul Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (13 November 1917), p. 1 of 5. Tate Archive. ‘Letters and Papers of Paul Nash’. www.tate.org.uk/​art/​arch​ive/​items/​tga-​8313-​ 1-​1-​162/​let​ter-​from-​paul-​nash-​to-​marga​ret-​nash-​writ​ten-​from-​fra​nce-​while-​ on-​com​miss​ion-​to-​make/​1. All letter excerpts, unless otherwise noted (such as those quoted in Bertram), are my own transcriptions from the Tate Digital

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Archive, ‘Letters and Papers of Paul Nash’ online. I have kept all original punctuation, capitalizations, and spelling, and have used ‘&’ where Nash writes a script-​like ‘E’ shape. 3 Lucien Febvre, L’Histoire dans le Monde en Ruines. 1919. Wikisource, La Bibliothèque Libre. https://​fr.wik​isou​rce.org/​wiki/​L%E2%80%99Histo​ire_​dans​_ ​le_​mond​e_​en​_​rui​nes (Accessed 20 July 2021). Translation by Alix Deymier. 4 Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 26. 5 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 16. 6 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 340. 7 Ibid. 8 For evidence of his reluctance, see his letter to Gordon Bottomley in late August or early September of 1914, where he writes: ‘I don’t see the necessity for a gentleminded creature like myself to be rushed into some stuffy brutal barracks and spend the next few months practically doing nothing but swagger about di[s]‌guised as a soldier in case the Germans poor misguided fellows—​ should land.’ Quoted in Anja Foerschner, ‘ “In the Midst of This Strange Country”: Paul Nash’s War Landscapes’, in Gordon Hughes and Philipp Blom (eds), Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2014), pp. 80–​87, p. 81. 9 Paul Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (18 April 1917), p. 1 of 6. Tate Archive. ‘Letters and Papers of Paul Nash’. www.tate.org.uk/​art/​arch​ive/​tga-​8313-​1-​1-​143/​let​ ter-​from-​paul-​nash-​to-​marga​ret-​nash-​writ​ten-​while-​on-​act​ive-​serv​ice-​in-​fra​nce 10 Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-​Garde Art and the Great War (New Haven, CT: Yale Univeristy Press, 1994), p. 198. 11 Foerschner, ‘Paul Nash’s War Landscapes’, p. 82. 12 Arthur Bernard Knapp and Wendy Ashmore, ‘Archaeological Landscapes: Constructed, Conceptualized, Ideational’, in Ashmore and Knapp (eds), Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-​ Blackwell, 1999), p. 12. 13 Ibid., p. 18. 14 Ibid. 15 See these images at Paul Nash and the Wittenham Clumps, www.nas​hclu​mps. org/​early.html. 16 Paul Nash, Outline: An Autobiography [1949] (London: Columbus Books, 1988), p. 122. 17 23 September 1911. Quoted in Anthony Bertram, Paul Nash: The Portrait of an Artist (London: Faber and Faber, 1955), p. 69. 18 Nash, Outline, p. 122. 19 Ibid. 20 Quoted in Bertram, Paul Nash, p. 64. 21 Paul Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (2 November 1916), p. 4 of 4. Tate Archive. ‘Letters and Papers of Paul Nash’. www.tate.org.uk/​art/​arch​ive/​items/​tga-​ 8313-​1-​1-​119/​let​ter-​from-​paul-​nash-​to-​marga​ret-​nash-​writ​ten-​from-​camber​ ley-​staff-​coll​ege/​4

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22 Paul Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (7 March 1917), pp. 4–​5 and 6 of 10. Tate Archive. ‘Letters and Papers of Paul Nash’. www.tate.org.uk/​art/​arch​ive/​ tga-​8313-​1-​1-​136/​let​ter-​from-​paul-​nash-​to-​marga​ret-​nash-​written-​while-​on​active-​service-​in-​france 23 Paul Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (March 1917), p. 2 of 12. Tate Archive. ‘Letters and Papers of Paul Nash’. www.tate.org.uk/​art/​arch​ive/​tga-​8313-​1-​1-​135/​let​ ter-​from-​paul-​nash-​to-​marga​ret-​nash-​writ​ten-​while-​on-​act​ive-​serv​ice-​in-​fra​nce 24 Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (7 March 1917), p. 2 of 10. 25 Quoted in Fussell, Great War, p. 391. 26 Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (13 November 1917), p. 1 of 5. 27 Wilfred Owen, ‘Strange Meeting’, 1919. www.poetr​yfou​ndat​ion.org/​poems/​ 47395/​stra​nge-​meet​ing 28 Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (13 November 1917), pp. 3–​4 of 5. 29 Bertram, Paul Nash, p. 100. 30 Petra is a prehistoric and archaeological city in present-​day Jordan, known for its elaborate tombs and temples, many of which are carved into the red sandstone mountain. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985. ‘Petra’. UNESCO World Heritage List, http://​whc.une​sco.org/​en/​list/​326. 31 Quoted in Bertram, Paul Nash, p. 112. 32 Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (6 April 1917), p. 6 of 10. Tate Archive. ‘Letters and Papers of Paul Nash’. www.tate.org.uk/​art/​arch​ive/​tga-​8313-​1-​1-​141/​let​ ter-​from-​paul-​nash-​to-​marga​ret-​nash-​writ​ten-​while-​on-​act​ive-​serv​ice-​in-​fra​nce 33 Sigmund Freud, From ‘The Uncanny’, 1919, trans. Alix Strachey, in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd edn (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), p. 825. 34 Hugh Haughton, Introduction. The Uncanny, by Sigmund Freud (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), p. liv. 35 Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (6 April 1917), p. 3 of 10. 36 Bertram, Paul Nash, p. 99. 37 Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (13 November 1917), p. 4 of 5. 38 The Battle of the Menin Road (also called the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge) was the third British attack during the Third Battle of the Ypres, in late September 1917. The First and Second Battles of Passchendaele occurred mostly in October and November 1917. The Third Battle of the Ypres is often called the Battle of Passchendaele. Names for Great War battles are notoriously slippery, as is the term ‘battle’ itself, since, as Fussell notes in The Great War and Modern Memory, the term has ‘been visited upon these events by subsequent historiography in the interest of neatness’, p. 8. 39 Fussell, Great War, p. 17. 40 Gabriel Moshenska, ‘The Archaeological Uncanny’, Public Archaeology 5 (2006), 92–​93. 41 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting & Bombardiering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 151. 42 Karin Sanders, Bodies in the Bog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 53. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., p. 54.

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45 Ibid., p. 59. 46 Paul Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (17 November 1917), p. 2 of 5. Tate Archive. ‘Letters and Papers of Paul Nash.’ www.tate.org.uk/​art/​arch​ive/​items/​tga-​ 8313-​1-​1-​163/​let​ter-​from-​paul-​nash-​to-​marga​ret-​nash-​writ​ten-​from-​fra​nce-​ while-​on-​com​miss​ion-​to-​make/​2 47 See Philip McCouat, ‘The Life and Death of Mummy Brown’, Journal of Art in Society (2013; 2019), www.artin​soci​ety.com/​the-​life-​and-​death-​of-​mummy-​ brown.html 48 c. 1 August, Quoted in Bertram, Paul Nash, p. 81. 49 Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (6 April 1917), pp. 1 and 2 of 10. 50 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 33. 51 Cork, A Bitter Truth, p. 202. 52 I refer to the titles Nash created for his fourteen full plates for this work, provided by Philip Brockbank, ‘Browne and Paul Nash: The Genesis of Form’, in C.A. Patrides (ed.), Approaches to Sir Thomas Browne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), p. 119. 53 For an examination of the mummy hand in late-​Victorian fiction, see Aviva Briefel, ‘Hands of Beauty, Hands of Horror: Fear and Egyptian Art at the Fin de Siècle’, Victorian Studies 50:2 (2008), 263–​271. 54 Brockbank, ‘Browne and Paul Nash’, p. 118. 55 Ibid., p. 117. 56 Ibid., p. 118. 57 Paul Nash, ‘Unseen Landscapes’ [1938], in Andrew Causey (ed.), Paul Nash: Writings on Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 144. 58 Ibid. 59 Brockbank, ‘Browne and Paul Nash’, p. 124. 60 Paul Nash, ‘The Life of the Inanimate Object’, 1937 in Andrew Causey (ed.), Paul Nash: Writings on Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 138. 61 Simon Grant, ‘Paul Nash: War Artist, Landscape Painter’, in Jemima Montagu (ed.), Paul Nash: Modern Artist, Ancient Landscape (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), p. 42. 62 Paul Nash, ‘Monster Field’ [1939], in Andrew Causey (ed.), Paul Nash: Writings on Art (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 151. 63 Grant, ‘Paul Nash’, p. 42. 64 Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 19. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Nash, ‘To Margaret Nash’ (6 April 1917). 68 Seth Reno, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–​1884 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), p. 76. 69 Nicholas Daly, ‘The Volcanic Disaster Narrative: From Pleasure Garden to Canvas, Page, and Stage’, Victorian Studies 53:2 (2011), 263. 70 Letter dated 23 December 1923. Quoted in David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–​1939 (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 24.

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71 Louise Mack, A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War (Leonaur, 2011), p. 28, original italics. 72 Ibid. 73 E. Gilson, Quoted by Logan Marshall in Horrors and Atrocities of the Great War (Philadelphia: L.T. Myers, 1915), p. 165. 74 Judith Harris, Pompeii Awakened: A Story of Rediscovery (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), p. 2. 75 Harris, Pompeii Awakened, p. 165. 76 Edward Bulwer-​Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii, 1834 (Garden City, NY: De Luxe Editions Club), pp. 307–​308. 77 Ibid., p. 295. 78 Ibid., p. 308. 79 S.J. Hales, ‘Re-​Casting Antiquity: Pompeii and the Crystal Palace’, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 14:1 (2006), 107. 80 Ibid. 81 William St Clair and Annika Bautz, ‘Imperial Decadence: The Making of the Myths in Edward Bulwer-​Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii’, Victorian Literature and Culture 40 (2012), 387. 82 Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (Albany, NY: SUNY Press), p. 108. 83 Ibid., pp. 120, 115. 84 See Zimmerman, Ch. 5, especially pp. 111–​112. Also, [Lewis, John Delaware] ‘The City of Sudden Death’, Household Words 5 (1852), pp. 171–​176; ‘A Day at Pompeii’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 11 (1855), pp. 721–​743. 85 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. VI, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 2003), p. 169. Francesca Spiegel also draws the comparison between Charlus’s reflection and Bulwer’s Last Days. Francesca Spiegel, ‘In Search of Lost Time and Pompeii’, in Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul (eds), Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 233. 86 For a thorough examination of the narrator’s, and Charlus’s perspectives in this moment, particularly in regards to the moralising of the Paris /​Pompeii comparison, see Spiegel, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, pp. 232–​245. 87 Ibid., p. 233. 88 Ibid., p. 237. 89 Proust, Time Regained, p. 169. 90 ‘London in A.D. 2346’, Punch 11 (1846), p. 186. 91 Spiegel, ‘In Search of Lost Time,’ p. 235. 92 Proust, Time Regained, pp. 169–​170. 93 Ibid., pp. 244, 245. 94 Proust, Time Regained, p. 170. 95 See Eric M. Moormann, ‘Christians and Jews at Pompeii in Late Nineteenth-​ Century Fiction’, in Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul (eds), Pompeii in the Public Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 96 Spiegel, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, p. 235.

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7 Ibid., p. 236. 9 98 Ibid., p. 234. 99 H.D., Asphodel (Durham: Durham University Press, 1992), p. 118. 100 Ibid., p. 118. 101 John Delaware Lewis, ‘Preservation and Destruction’, Household Words 5 (1852), p. 283. 102 Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy [1846] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1903), p. 171. 103 Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians, p. 121. 104 Jason Urbanus, ‘A Last Day, Reclaimed’, Archaeology (Nov/​Dec 2016), 50. 105 Ibid., p. 51. 106 Austen Henry Layard, ‘Pompeii’, Quarterly Review 115 (1864), p. 332. 107 Ria Dunkley, Nigel Morgan, and Sheena Westwood, ‘Visiting the Trenches: Exploring Meanings and Motivations in Battlefield Tourism’, Tourism Management 32 (2011), 862. doi: 10.1016/​j.tourman.2010.07.011 108 Urbanus, ‘A Last Day, Reclaimed’, p. 49–50. 109 Bulwer, Last Days, p. 104. 110 The following section on Mary Butts was first published in Tulsa Studies in fairy-​ Women’s Literature 28.2 (Fall 2019), as ‘Mary Butts and the “War-​ tale”: Femininity, Archaeology, and Great War Rhetoric in Ashe of Rings’. 111 Mary Butts, ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, in Nathalie Blondel (ed.), Ashe of Rings and Other Writings by Mary Butts (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1998), p. 349. 112 Ibid., p. 350. 113 Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1998), p. 113. 114 Ibid., p. 350. 115 Andrew Radford, ‘Excavating a Secret History: Mary Butts and the Return of the Nativist’, Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 17:1 (2007/​ 2008), 81. 116 Roslyn Reso Foy, Ritual, Myth, and Mysticism in the Work of Mary Butts: Between Feminism and Modernism (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), p. 5. 117 Blondel, Introduction to The Journals of Mary Butts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 4. 118 Andrew Radford, ‘The Enchantment of Place: Mary Butts, Wessex, and Interwar Neo-​Romanticism’, National Identities 14:2 (2012), pp. 157–​172, p. 157. 119 Butts, ‘Warning to Hikers’, in Nathalie Blondel (ed.), Ashe of Rings and Other Writings by Mary Butts (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1998), p. 277. 120 Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 94. 121 Radford, ‘Excavating a Secret History’, p. 81. 122 Sam Wiseman, The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2015), p. 87. 123 Foy, Ritual, p. 14.

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24 Blondel, introduction to The Journals of Mary Butts, p. 5. 1 125 Foy, Ritual, p. 13. 126 David Matless, ‘A Geography of Ghosts: The Spectral Landscapes of Mary Butts’, Cultural Geographies 15:3 (2008), 340. 127 Butts, ‘Warning’, p. 281. 128 Ibid., p. 294. 129 Hauser, Shadow Sites, p. 31. 130 Radford, ‘Excavating’, p. 81. 131 Butts, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), p. 93. 132 Hauser, Shadow Sites, p. 32. 133 Butts, Crystal Cabinet, p. 12. 134 Ibid., p. 54. 135 Ibid., pp. 249–​250. 136 Nathalie Blondel, Preface to Ashe of Rings and Other Writings, pp. ix–​x. 137 Butts, afterword to Ashe of Rings, in Ashe of Rings and Other Writings, in Nathalie Blondel (ed.), Ashe of Rings and Other Writings by Mary Butts (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1998), p. 232. 138 Butts, Ashe of Rings, in Ashe of Rings and Other Writings, p. 44. 139 Butts, The Journals of Mary Butts, 293. 140 Butts, Crystal Cabinet, p. 54. 141 Butts, ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, p. 349. 142 Butts, Afterword, p. 232. 143 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 13. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid., p. 19. 146 Ibid., pp. 6–​7. 147 Between 1882 and 1931, following Parliament’s passage of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act, around three thousand ancient monuments in Britain came under protection by law; see Smiles, ‘Ancient Country’, p. 34. 148 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, Sexchanges (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 261. 149 Ibid., p. 260. 150 See Bourke, Dismembering the Male. 151 See Haggard’s Ayesha: The Return of She (1905); Corelli’s Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul (1897); and Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). For an overview of late Victorian writers’ use of Egyptology, particularly the female mummy, to intervene in debates about femininity, see Angie Blumberg, ‘Victorian Literature and Archaeology: Contemporary Excavations’, Literature 6, https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​lic3.12444; and Compass 15:4 (2018), pp. 4–​ Nolwenn Corriou, ‘ “A Woman is a Woman, if She had been Dead Five Thousand Centuries!”: Mummy Fiction, Imperialism and the Politics of Gender’, Miranda 11 (2015) http://​journ​als. openedition.org/​miranda/​6899. 152 Butts, ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, p. 353.

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53 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 86. 1 154 Ibid., pp. 123–​124. 155 Foy, Ritual, p. 41. 156 Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Daughters of War’, The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford, http://​ww1​lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/​ww1lit/​­collections/​ item/​3267. 157 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 80. 158 Ibid., p. 81. 159 Foy, Ritual, p. 43. 160 Ibid. 161 Butts, Ashe of Rings, pp. 148–​149. 162 Ibid., p. 149. ‘Stoop then and wash’ alludes to act three, scene one of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Just after Caesar’s death, Brutus suggests he, Cassius, and fellow conspirators bathe their hands in Caesar’s blood. This terse, italicised allusion is characteristic of Butts’s allusions throughout the novel. 163 Ibid., p. 71. 164 Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, http://​ww1​lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/​ww1​lit/​collections/​item/​3303. Wiseman notes another moment in Ashe of Rings in which the lexicon of war appears in an unusual context. Melitta experiences the ‘turf clos[ing] round empty shells. The path was sharp with flints, the heat like an army with banners’, p. 15. He states, ‘It is as though the violence of the war has invaded the rural environment, and become entwined with the rejuvenation of values which Butts hopes to enact there’, p. 79. 165 Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, http://​ww1​lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/​ww1​lit/​collections/​item/​3268; and Frederick Manning, ‘Grotesque’, Discover War Poets, https://​warpo​ets.org.uk/​worldw​ar1/​ blog/​poem/​grotes​que/​. 166 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 71. 167 Bourke, Dismembering the Male, p. 33. 168 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 74. 169 Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Glory of Women’, Poetry Foundation, www.poetr​yfou​ndat​ ion.org/​poems-​and-​poets/​poems/​det​ail/​57368. 170 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 116. 171 Ibid., pp. 23, 27. 172 Ibid., p. 151. 173 Radford, Andrew, ‘The Enchantment of Place: Mary Butts, Wessex, and Interwar Neo-​Romanticism’, National Identities 14:2 (June 2012), 162. 174 Ibid., p. 14. 175 Ibid., p. 20. 176 Radford, ‘Excavating a Secret History’, p. 81. 177 Ibid., p. 87. 178 Butts, ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, p. 363. 179 Jane Ellen Harrison, Prologomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), pp. 260–​261.

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80 Ibid., pp. 263, 264. 1 181 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 8. 182 Butts, ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, p. 356. 183 Butts addressed the Egyptian queen in her own historical fiction entitled Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra (1935). For a discussion of the relationship between Haggard’s and Butts’s Cleopatra tales, see Radford, ‘Mary Butts, Revisionary Classicism and H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra’, Interactions 24:1–​2 (2015). 184 Owen, Preface to Poems, Project Gutenberg, last updated 4 February 2013, www.gutenb​erg.org/​files/​1034/​1034-​h/​1034-​h.htm. 185 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 150. 186 Ibid., p. 44. The text repeatedly associates Vanna and the Ashes with Jesus Christ, often referring to a family legend in which Florian Ashe was crucified on the estate in the middle ages (pp. 19–​20). Later in the text, Judy tears Vanna’s forehead with ‘a thorned bramble sucker’, again creating a parallel to the Christ figure, p. 192. Foy also reads this moment as a reference to Briar Rose; like this fairy-​tale heroine, Vanna is ‘about to awaken and renew the land’, p. 46. 187 Ibid., p. 150. 188 Ibid., p. 186. 189 Ibid., p. 149. 190 Ibid., p. 187. 191 Ibid., pp. 187–​188. 192 Ibid., p. 188. 193 D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 117. 194 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 189. 195 Wiseman, The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism, p. 73. 196 Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’, in The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (New York: John Lane, 1919), p. 111. 197 Ford Madox Ford, Parade’s End (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 487. 198 Butts, ‘Warning’, p. 289. 199 Vincent Sherry, ‘Imbalances: Mass Death and the Economy of “Sacrifice” in the Great War’, in Santanu Das and Kate McLoughlin (eds), First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 74. The letter was composed by Lord Derby and Rudyard Kipling in 1917. For readers interested in how the precise language of the letter was determined, Sherry cites Richard van Emden’s The Quick and the Dead: Fallen Soldiers and Their Families in the Great War (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 208–​210. 200 Sherry, ‘Imbalances’, p. 96. 201 Ibid. 202 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 86. 203 Butts, ‘Warning’, p. 290. 204 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 219. 205 Vanna’s sacrifice has not, however, saved Serge, who chooses to return to Judy. The generational conflict in Ashe of Rings is signalled primarily in Melitta’s inability to understand and appreciate the Rings. In one of many examples,

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Vanna thinks, ‘Mothers ought not to be like that; not with a war on. They should be proper mothers who comfort their children. But she’d have us dead; me really dead’, p. 183. Vanna’s ponderings recall various war poems, like Sassoon’s ‘The Hero’ (1917), in which a mother hears the ‘gallant lies’ about her son’s death and tells the messenger, ‘We mothers are so proud /​Of our dead soldiers’; see Sassoon, ‘The Hero’, in War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), p. 28, lines 8, 5–​6. 206 Butts, Ashe of Rings, p. 203. 207 Ibid., p. 211. 208 Ibid., p. 227. 209 Ibid., p. 207. 210 Butts, ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’, p. 363. 211 Fussell, Great War, p. 8. 212 Charles Edmund Carrington, ‘Some Soldiers’, in George A. Panichas (ed.), Promise of Greatness: The War of 1914–​1918 (New York: John Day, 1968), p. 157. See also Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 12–​13. 213 Saunders, ‘Excavating Memories’, p. 101.

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CODA: Archaeology from a distance

In the summer of 1940, during the Second World War, Paul Nash visited the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He requested enlarged copies of seven aerial photographs taken by Major George Allen, a wealthy amateur archaeologist who took nearly a thousand photographs of archaeological and historical sites from the air between 1933 and 1939.1 Aerial archaeology was not then brand new—​the first real aerial archaeology took place in Rome in 1899, when Giacomo Boni recorded his excavations in the Roman forum with photos taken from a Special Brigade of Military Engineers balloon.2 However, during the First World War, aerial photographs became an important technique for reconnaissance, and according to Giuseppe Ceraudo, the enormous quantities of photographs taken for military purposes during the war were instructional for later photographic studies of archaeological topography.3 In fact, aerial archaeology is now one of the most prominent methods of studying the Great War: ‘As the final generation of survivors of the First World War has now passed away, the importance of archaeology and the landscape itself as the last remaining witnesses of the conflict is growing rapidly.’4 Recently, archaeologists and geologists collated and assessed a collection of over 9000 aerial photographs taken during the war, in order to understand ‘the shifting nature of the historic struggle’ near the Ypres in Belgium, where Nash was briefly stationed.5 Though we cannot be sure whether Nash received the images he requested in 1940, Kitty Hauser suggests in Shadow Sites that he did, and bases her theory on similarities between the images and Nash’s cover design for J. Massingham’s book Remembrance (1941).6 Among the images Nash requested were photographs of notable archaeological features, including the White Horse at Uffington—​a prehistoric chalk hill carved to reveal a horse, and Wansdyke—​a series of prehistoric linear earthworks in Wiltshire. He had displayed interest in aerial photographs as early as his Dorset Shell Guide (1936), which includes an aerial image of Maiden Castle.7 Nash’s request demonstrates his continued fascination with prehistoric landscape features in the mid twentieth century. By 1940, when he was employed

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by the Air Ministry, he had greater access to aerial views, and the shaping influence of aerial photography on his paintings Target Area (1940) and The Battle of Germany (1944) is well documented. In his recognition that from a distance, both ancient and modern landscapes assume strange and beautiful shapes, Nash anticipated the current re-​valuation in both archaeology and literary scholarship of critical distance. Now, with ever-​improving technology, archaeologists are gathering more and more data from further afar. Aerial photography and other remote data-​ collecting techniques, like ground penetrating radar, often obviate the necessity for actual digging, ultimately preserving artefacts and structures beneath the soil. In fact, when the COVID-​19 pandemic first pushed workers indoors, Chris Smart and a group of volunteers at the University of Exeter began collaborating to develop new perspectives on the landscapes of Britain. Using LiDar (light detection and ranging), a laser technology deployed during aerial surveys, the team discovered (as of 13 May 2020) ‘parts of two Roman roads, around 30 prehistoric or Roman large embanked settlement enclosures, around 20 prehistoric burial mounds, as well as the remains of hundreds of medieval farms, field systems and quarries’.8 The team regularly cross-​referenced the new information gathered through the LiDar technology with existing maps, resulting in an ever-​changing understanding of the land and its history—​suggesting new ways of reading such landscapes, which were cleverly dubbed ‘lockdown landscapes’. Thus, when people all over the world became distanced from each other, and archaeologists were kept from the trenches, professionals and non-​specialists began uncovering new ways both of discovering and of seeing human occupation across time. Perhaps one of the most significant advantages of aerial photography in particular is its capacity to reveal shapes and structures invisible at ground level. ‘Shadow sites’, for example, ‘are the markings left on the surface of the land from former usage, foundations, earthworks, field boundaries and the like, imperceptible at ground level but showing up in aerial photography at certain times of year or in raking light.’9 These markings appear in many of the earliest aerial photographs of English sites, including Stonehenge.10 Sam Smiles notes that beyond this more literal definition, ‘[S]‌hadow sites may also be understood metaphorically to refer to a latency of meaning in landscape whose potential is revealed through the landscape’s imaginative appropriation.’11 As an artist continually inspired by the landscape’s latent meanings, Nash likely appreciated aerial photography’s revelation of otherwise obscure shapes, patterns, and meanings. Alongside contemporary developments in archaeological methods, scholars in the humanities are also adopting new ways of reading texts—​or, thousands of texts at a time—​from a distance. In their 2009 article ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus claim that since the turn of

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the twenty-​first century, critics ‘have been drawn to modes of reading that attend to the surfaces of texts rather than plumb their depths’.12 Instead of seeing the surface as ‘a layer that conceals’, critics are beginning to take the term surface ‘to mean what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding […] has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth’.13 This mode of reading stresses attention to the complexity of literary surfaces, and may help us, Best and Marcus suggest, to see ‘patterns that exist within and across texts’ and to ‘locate narrative structures and abstract patterns on the surface’.14 As a critical approach, surface reading resembles aerial archaeology, which also paradoxically uncovers wider structures and patterns by not digging—​by taking a step back. Many contemporary scholars are assuming even greater critical distance, stepping much farther away from the solitary text to view many texts at once. Informed by Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (2013), digital humanists turn to big data analysis and text mining both to ask new questions, and to come to new conclusions about cultural, literary, and aesthetic landscapes. Do these transformations in archaeological and scholarly methods likewise transform the archaeological encounter and its representations? Does the replacement of proximity with distance, and tactility with abstraction mean that our encounters with the past will thereby become emotionally distant or abstracted? Or do these new methods offer us parallel modes of knowing and creating? Many fin-​de-​siècle writers and artists were obsessed with buried or neglected stories, those hidden beneath the surface, in the interstices between past and present. At the same time, aesthetes and decadents developed a cultural celebration of surface and ornamentation, recognising the fluid possibilities in what is readily evident—​in the flatness of a portrait or the momentary aesthetic impression—​perhaps anticipating in some ways the revelations of modern critical distance. Whether attending to depths or external features, writers and artists at the turn of the twentieth century transformed the discourses of modern experience through representations of the encounter with the distant or more recent past. It may be too soon to tell what contemporary writers and artists will do with cutting edge twenty-​first century modes of archaeological excavation. But perhaps they will respond to the aesthetic exigencies of a more distanced archaeological encounter through an intimacy of wider perception—​stepping back from the tactile encounter in a way that renders cultural and even personal boundaries invisible—​wandering in the shadow sites, revealing pasts and futures we had not imagined.

Notes 1 Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 183, 158.

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2 Giuseppe Ceraudo, ‘Aerial Photography in Archaeology’, in Good Practice in Archaeological Diagnostics (2013), 11. 3 Ibid., p. 12. 4 Birger Stichelbaut, et al., ‘The Ypres Salient 1914–​ 1918: Historical Aerial Photography and the Landscape of War,’ Antiquity 91:355 (2015), 235. doi: 10.15184/​aqy.2016.260 5 See Stichelbaut, et al. 6 Hauser, Shadow Sites, p. 185. 7 Paul Nash, Dorset Shell Guide (London: Architectural Press, 1936). 8 ‘Dozens of prehistoric, Roman and medieval sites discovered by archaeology volunteers working at home during lockdown.’ University of Exeter Research and Innovation, www.exe​ter.ac.uk/​resea​rch/​news/​artic​les/​dozens​ofpr​ehis​tori​ crom​ana.html 9 Samuel Smiles, ‘What Lies Beneath’, Oxford Art Journal 31:3 (2008), pp. 454–​457, p. 455. 10 See ‘Stonehenge from an Army balloon’, 1906, reprinted in Ceraudo, ‘Aerial Photography’, p. 15. 11 Smiles, ‘What Lies Beneath’, p. 455. 12 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108:1 (2009), 1–​2. 13 Ibid., p. 9. 14 Ibid., p. 11, original italics.

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Index

Note: Literary works and artworks can be found under authors’ or artists’ names. aerial photography 236–​238 aestheticism 10, 108, 142, 152, 164, 169–​170 artistic or aesthetic impression(s) 86, 92, 100, 102, 103, 107, 110, 120, 127, 150, 152–​153, 238 and forgery 142–​143, 169–​170 and Hellenism 10, 164 and realism 142–​143 Ancient Monuments Protection Act 12 Assyria 7–​8, 11–​12 Assyrian bulls 7–​8, 64–​68, 73 see also Forster, E.M., Maurice; Layard, Austen Henry Belzoni, Giovanni Battista 8, 163 Brooke, Rupert ‘The Soldier’ 223 Browne, (Sir) Thomas Havelock Ellis on 89 Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial 16, 85–​86, 91–​93, 127, 192 and Paul Nash 190–​195 and Virginia Woolf 122–​124, 127 and Walter Pater 16–​17, 85–​86, 90, 92–​93, 96 Bulwer-​Lytton, Edward Last Days of Pompeii, The 20, 149, 198–​200, 202, 205, 207 Butts, Mary 19–​20, 176, 207–​226 Ashe of Rings 209, 212–​226 and Badbury Rings 207–​208, 212–​213

Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns, The 208, 211–​212 on First World War 210, 212–​215 ‘Ghosties and Ghoulies’ 207–​208, 214, 216–​217, 220, 225 and modernism 208–​210 ‘Warning to Hikers’ 210–​211, 223–​224 Carpenter, Edward 65 Carter, Howard 1–​2, 18, 47 Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen, The 1–​2 forgeries 138, 165 catacomb(s) 96, 123, 125, 127–​128 Cavafy, Constantine Peter 72–​73 classicism 92, 220 colonialism/​colonialist 5–​6, 12, 68, 70 postcolonial 5, 12 Corelli, Marie 9, 20, 216, 218 Decadence Decadent aesthetics 16, 94, 100, 204 Decadent landscapes 70 Decadent style 84, 89, 101, 103, 105 Eaton, Charles (Charley) 154 Ebers, Georg The Hellenic Portraits from the Fayum 29 Edwards, Amelia 8, 12 Egypt 1–​3, 8–​9, 12, 15, 23n.30–​32, 26 Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 8, 15, 29, 31

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552

Index Fayum mummy portraits 29–​30 see also Edwards, Amelia; Forster, E.M.; gender, and Egypt; Nash, Paul; Ricketts, Charles; Wilde, Oscar ekphrasis/​ekphrastic 39, 88, 104, 117 Elgin marbles see Parthenon sculptures Ellis, Havelock 89 empire see imperial(ism) epistemology 153 archaeological epistemology 15, 16, 21 queer archaeological epistemology 31, 73 queer epistemology 28 Evans, John ‘The Forgery of Antiquities’ 18, 140, 141, 146, 150–​151, 154 Fayum mummy portraits 15, 17, 29–​31, 37, 74, 83, 115 First World War archaeological excavations 206–​207, 226 No Man’s Land 179, 186, 196, 210, 214, 216 sacrifice 221–​225 see also aerial photography; Brooke, Rupert; Butts, Mary; Ford, Ford Madox; gender, and First World War; Mack, Louise; Nash, Paul; Owen, Wilfred; Rosenberg, Isaac; Sassoon, Siegfried Flint Jack [Edward Simpson] 154–​156, 160 Ford, Ford Madox Parade’s End 223 forgeries Billy and Charley forgeries 154 Clyde objects see Lang, Andrew detection of, or fakebusting 144–​153 Sherlock Holmes 146–​147, 152, 162 Dumbuck or Dunbuie see Lang, Andrew, Clyde Mystery, The fake(s), fakery 17, 18, 138–​143 flints/​flint implements 148–​149, 155–​156

255

H. Rider Haggard’s pot sherd 18, 143 and linguistic play 162–​163 in Montmartre 160–​161 portrait of Willie Hughes 18, 57, 60–​61 skills of forgers 154–​158 Tiara of Saitaphernes 158–​160 see also Flint Jack; Eaton, Charles (Charley); Marcy, Louis; Rouchomovsky, Israel; Smith, William (Billy) Forster, E.M. Alexandria: A History and a Guide 63, 68–​69 and Egypt 63, 68, 80n.168, 71 ‘For the Museum’s Sake’ 63, 65 and Greece or Hellenism (in Maurice) 62, 64–​67, 71, 73 Maurice 11, 15, 31, 62–​68, 72 and Mohammed el Adl 68 Pharos and Pharillon 15, 31, 62, 68–​73 and Siegfried Sassoon 68 Freud, Sigmund 4, 27, 33, 188–​189 ‘Aetiology of Hysteria, The’ 5, 27 ‘Uncanny, The’ 186, 188 Futurism 4 gender androgyny in Lee’s ‘Prince Alberic’ 40 in Wilde’s The Sphinx 26, 50–​51 and Egypt 9, 23n.33, 24n.35, 28, 232n.151 feminine/​femininity 209, 232n.151 in Lee’s ‘Oke of Okehurst’ 9, 20, 76n.44, 104 and First World War 216 and forgers 173n.78 in Mary Butts 213, 217–​221, 223, 225 and Oscar Wilde (The Sphinx) 49 and queer archaeology 14, 27 and Vernon Lee ‘Oke of Okehurst’ 108, 121, 134n.158 Louis Norbert 118 and Virginia Woolf 121, 128

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Index

ghost(s) ghost city (in E.M. Forster) 68, 70, 72 see also Lee, Vernon, ‘Amour Dure’, ‘Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art’, Louis Norbert, ‘Oke of Okehurst’, and Preface to Hauntings Great War see First World War Greece 9–​10, 28 see also Forster, E.M.; Hellenism; Pater, Walter; sexuality, and ancient Greece; Wilde, Oscar H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] 19, 20, 176 Asphodel 204–​205 Haggard, Henry Rider 12, 20, 34, 143, 218, 221 Ayesha 217, 219 She 143, 216, 219 ‘Smith and the Pharaohs’ 190 Hardy, Thomas Tess of the d’Urbervilles 223 Harrison, Jane Ellen 32, 220, 224 Hellenism (Hellenistic, Hellenic) 9–​10, 14, 85, 163–​164 Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 45 see also Forster E.M.; Pater, Walter; Wilde, Oscar Hirst, Damien Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable 18, 166–​170 historiography 7, 15, 19, 20, 31, 32, 41, 60, 73, 99, 117, 119, 165, 167, 168, 170 Annales school 177–​178 erotohistoriography 41–​42, 73 First World War 19, 177, 198, 203–​206, 226, 228n.38 imperial(ism) 5–​7, 8, 11–​13, 63–​64, 69–​71, 73, 203 Kelmscott Press 55 landscape(s) 20–​21, 180 and Butts, Mary 19–​20, 176, 208–​216, 220–​226

of First World War 19, 177, 184–​186, 197, 207, 211–​212, 236 and Forster, E.M. 31, 66, 70–​72 ideational landscapes 19, 180, 192, 226 ‘lockdown landscapes’ 237 and Nash, Paul 19, 176, 179–​181, 184–​186, 189–​190, 192, 196, 236–​237 and Wilde, Oscar (The Sphinx) 45, 47, 51 see also Decadence, Decadent landscapes Lang, Andrew Clyde Mystery, The 147–​150, 157–​158, 162 Lawrence, D.H. 216 The Rainbow 222 Layard, Austen Henry 11, 206 Nineveh and its Remains 11 Lee, Vernon [Violet Paget] ‘Amour Dure’ 34–​38, 41–​42, 44 ‘Blame of Portraits, The’ 84, 105, 109, 128 Enchanted Woods, and Other Essays on the Genius of Places, The 100, 112 and Eugénie Sellers 32 Euphorion; Being Studies of the Antique and the Medieval in the Renaissance 32–​33, 41 ‘Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art’ 16, 99–​100, 103–​104 Genius Loci: Notes on Places 16, 33, 98, 100 and Jane Ellen Harrison 32 Louis Norbert: A Two-​Fold Romance 16, 100, 112–​121, 139, 146, 149 ‘Oke of Okehurst’ 16, 84, 98, 100–​111, 113, 121, 134n.158 ‘Pisa and the Campo Santo’ 100, 112 Preface to Hauntings 33, 36, 99 ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ 34–​36, 38–​44 ‘Ravenna and Her Ghosts’ 77n.62 Renaissance Fancies and Studies 32 Spirit of Rome, The 34

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Index Mack, Louise 19, 176 A Woman’s Experiences in the Great War 197–​198 Marcy, Louis 18, 156–​157 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Emilio ‘Manifeste du Futurisme’ 4 Mexico and Central America 12 modernism 4, 13, 16, 129 and Mary Butts 208, 210, 222 and Vernon Lee 100, 114 and Virginia Woolf 122 Montmartre 160 Morelli, Giovanni 146 ‘Morellian method’ 146, 150 Moretti, Franco Distant Reading 238 de Mortillet, Gabriel 148–​149, 159, 162 Mount Vesuvius 10, 197–​202 mummy/​mummies 2–​3, 7–​9, 28–​29, 45–​46, 59, 141 fake mummy 160–​161 mummies in late-​Victorian romance 190, 216, 218, 232n.151 ‘mummy brown’ 189 see also Fayum mummy portraits Munro, Robert 18, 140 Archaeology and False Antiquities 144–​147, 150–​151, 162 Andrew Lang on 147–​150, 157 museum(s) 6 British Museum 7–​9, 12, 45, 47, 63–​65, 86, 147–​148, 156, 159, 164 and forgeries 140–​142, 146, 156, 158–​160 Louvre 158–​160 Victoria and Albert Museum 140, 142, 156, 164 Nash, Paul 12, 19–​20, 176, 179–​196, 236–​237 and aerial photography 236–​237 Battle of Germany, The 237 Dorset Shell Guide 236 and Egypt 181–​182 illustrations for Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial 190–​196 letters 176, 179, 180–​181, 183–​186, 189–​190, 197, 226n.2, 227n.8

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‘Life of the Inanimate Object, The’ 194 Menin Road, The 185–​188, 190, 205 ‘Monster Field’ 194 Outline: An Autobiography 180–​181 Passchendaele 179, 185 Pyramids in the Sea, The 180–​182, 185 and Second World War 194, 236–​237 Target Area 237 ‘Unseen Landscapes’ 192 We Are Making a New World 185, 187, 190, 192 Ypres 179, 187 neo-​Romantic(ism) 12, 196, 208–​209 New Woman 9 Orientalism 6, 11, 49 Owen, Wilfred 182, 216, 221 ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ 218 ‘Strange Meeting’ 184 Paris 29, 56, 70, 156, 159–​160, 200–​203 Pater, Walter Appreciations, With an Essay on Style 16, 84–​85 ‘Art Notes in North Italy’ 98 ‘Beginnings of Greek Sculpture, The’ 86 ‘Child in the House, The’ 82 ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ 82, 90–​93 ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ 82, 89–​91, 93–​94 ‘Gaudioso, the Second’ 82, 95–​98 and Greece/​Greek, or Hellenism 10, 85–​88, 92–​93 Greek Studies 87–​88 Hellenism 85, 87, 92, 153 Imaginary Portraits 16, 82, 84, 88, 90–​98 and Johann Joachim Winckelmann 16, 85, 87–​88, 92, 153 ‘Myth of Demeter and Persephone, The’ 89 Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures 88

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Pater, Walter (continued) Renaissance, The 16–​17, 37, 76n.43, 85–​88, 92, 127, 152–​153, 204 ‘Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew, The’ 92 and Thomas Browne 16–​17, 85–​86, 93, 96, 123–​124 and Virginia Woolf 121–​123 Parthenon Sculptures 9, 11, 45, 86 Petrie, (Sir) William Flinders 9, 15, 47 Pompeii and Herculaneum 4, 10–​ 11, 19–​20, 145, 176–​177, 196–​207 see also Bulwer-​Lytton, Edward, Last Days of Pompeii, The portrait(s)/portraiture 15–​18, 31, 74, 100–​101, 111, 121 epistemology of 16, 84 literary portrait, prose portrait, or imaginary portrait genre 37–​38, 82–​84, 95, 97, 104, 119 and sexuality 37, 83, 121 in Vernon Lee’s ‘Amour Dure’ 37–​38 in Vernon Lee’s Louis Norbert 100, 114, 117 in Vernon Lee’s ‘Oke of Okehurst’ 101–​106, 110 in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando 125 see also Fayum mummy portraits; Lee, Vernon, ‘Blame of Portraits, The’; Pater, Walter, Imaginary Portraits; Wilde, Oscar, Portrait of Mr. W.H., The Pre-​Raphaelites 55 Proust, Marcel 19, 62 In Search of Lost Time 200–​204 queer studies queer archaeological epistemology 16, 31 queer archaeology 14, 27 queer identity 14, 24n.32, 27, 35 queer temporalities 14, 27, 31 asynchrony 43, 51, 103 see also sexuality

Read, Charles 144, 147–​148, 151, 154, 156 realism 142, 150, 153, 164, 189 Ricketts, Charles 14–​15, 18, 27, 31, 46 ‘Age-​Long Egypt’ 46–​47 illustrations for Wilde’s The Sphinx 47–​49, 50–​55 and Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr. W.H. 57, 61 Silence 56 Rosenberg, Isaac 216 ‘Daughters of War’ 217 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel ‘The Burden of Nineveh’ 7–​8, 11, 64, 74 Rouchomovsky, Israel 159–​160 rubbish 33–​34, 72, 145, 205 Sassoon, Siegfried 68, 178, 182, 216, 221 ‘Glory of Women’ 219 ‘Hero, The’ 235n.205 sexuality and ancient Greece 9–​10, 28 and Hellenism 220 (de)criminalisation of homosexuality 63–​64, 66 and Egyptology 28 queer or non-​normative sexuality 15, 73 in Ebers, Georg, The Hellenic Portraits from the Fayum 29 in Forster, E.M. Maurice 62–​67 in Forster, E.M. Pharos and Pharillon 68–​73 in Lee, Vernon, ‘Amour Dure’ and ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ 34–​44 relationship with archaeology 27 in Wilde, Oscar, The Portrait of Mr. W.H. 57–​62 in Wilde, Oscar, The Sphinx 26–​27, 47–​56 and war (in Butts, Mary, Ashe of Rings) 216–​219 Schliemann, Heinrich discovery of Troy 9, 27, 45, 148

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952

Index Smith, Charles Roach 154 Smith, William (Billy) 154 Society for Psychical Research 33, 158 Stoker, Bram 34, 216 Jewel of Seven Stars, The 9, 190, 218 supernatural in Vernon Lee 99–​100, 109, 111, 118, 121 surface reading 238 see also Moretti, Franco, Distant Reading Symonds, John Addington 10, 45, 67, 152 on Walter Pater 89 Problem in Greek Ethics, A 28 Studies of the Greek Poets 28 Symons, Arthur 83 Tanagra figurines 18, 56, 141–​142, 163–​164 tourism 10, 13, 20, 197–​198, 200, 206 Venus Victrix 98 de Villefosse, Heron and the Tiara of Saitaphernes 158–​159 Wakeling, T.G. Forged Egyptian Antiquities 151 Wilde, Oscar archaeological pursuits 44–​45

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‘Decay of Lying, The’ 138, 143, 169–​170 and Egypt 45, 47, 49, 52, 59 and Greece/​Greek or Hellenism 45–​46, 57 imprisonment of 35 letters 44–​45, 56–​57 Picture of Dorian Gray, The 31, 95 poems 45–​46 Portrait of Mr. W.H., The 2–​3, 18, 31, 57–​62 Sphinx, The 26, 47–​57 tomb 56 ‘Truth of Masks, The’ 6, 46, 156–​157 see also Ricketts, Charles Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 16, 28, 85, 87–​88, 92, 153 Woolf, Virginia diary entries 123, 129 ‘Elizabethan Lumber Room, The’ 122–​123, 126 ‘Hours in a Library’ 122 ‘Is This Poetry?’ 122 ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ 24n.51 Orlando: A Biography 121–​129 ‘Reading’ 122, 124 Room of One’s Own, A 128 ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ 122–​124 World Wars see First World War; Second World War

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