South Sea Daggers and the Dead Man’s Eye: Foreign Invasion in Fin-de-Siècle Optogram Fiction
This study looks at four fin-de-siècle texts that revolve around the central conceit of the ‘optogram,’ the photograph of a retinal image in a cadaver’s eye: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Claire Lenoir (1867–87), Rudyard Kipling’s ‘At the End of the Passage’ (1891), Jules Claretie’s L’Accusateur (1897),...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2005-12-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/15047 |
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| Summary: | This study looks at four fin-de-siècle texts that revolve around the central conceit of the ‘optogram,’ the photograph of a retinal image in a cadaver’s eye: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Claire Lenoir (1867–87), Rudyard Kipling’s ‘At the End of the Passage’ (1891), Jules Claretie’s L’Accusateur (1897), and Jules Verne’s Les Frères Kip (1902). Starting from the initial observation that these texts share a recurrent theme of violent death linked to colonial travel, this paper relates their optical motif to broader European anxieties about the irruption of a savage Other into the domestic space of a bodily, urban, or national self. This is the age of post-Pasteurian fears of microbial contagion, of pre-Freudian theories of atavistic threats to civilized order, of Lombrosan anthropometry and its identification of the criminal classes in Europe with the ‘primitive’ peoples of Africa, South America, Asia, and the South Seas. These discourses—of biological vulnerability, of psychic pathology, and of social-geographical deviance—allow us to re-read the optical theme of the retinal membrane as symbol for the anxiety-provoking porosity of national and civic boundaries in an age of colonial exchange. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |