Abstract

My dissertation shows that nineteenth-century philosophical and scientific inquiries into the relationship between vision and knowledge exerted a formative influence on the epistemology and ideology of Victorian ghost and detective fiction. In contrast to the popular assumption that it is possible to isolate a single dominant model or regime of vision in this period, I maintain that nineteenth-century visual culture was defined by the continuous negotiation and tension between different conceptual models, epistemologies, and ideologies. Chapter One argues that the Victorian ghost story registers the shift in the early nineteenth century from spiritual to physiological models of vision and the growing demand for empirical verification of notions that had traditionally been accepted as articles of faith, while at the same time opening a discursive space for expressions of dissent to the rule of rationalism and materialism by underscoring the unreliability of the bodily senses and nostalgically invoking a spiritual model of spectatorship. The second chapter argues that Victorian detective fiction puts back into circulation Bishop Berkeley's theory of a universal visual language, transforming it into a new kind of ocularcentric epistemological fantasy about the instantaneous discovery of "plain meaning," while simultaneously subscribing to the empiricist theory that observation is a compound of sensations and inferences, and as such is inevitably fraught with interpretive difficulties and epistemological uncertainties. Chapter Three examines how certain late-nineteenth century developments in physics and mathematics, most importantly non-Euclidean geometry and speculations about n-dimensional space, occasioned an increasing fascination in late-Victorian science in the invisible and the unseen, reorienting scientific discourse toward non-positivist, idealist conceptions of seeing and knowing, preeminently intuition. In the genre of psychic detection, a hybrid of ghost and detective fiction, this fascination manifests itself quite differently: as the paranoid anxiety of always being watched by unseen spectral watchers. The final chapter examines nineteenth-century spirit photographs and composite mug shots in terms of their mutual correspondences. In both photographic genres, I argue, the ostensible evidential value of the image ultimately depends on a mutually non-exclusive commitment to seemingly incompatible impulses and beliefs: ocularcentrism and antiocularcentrism, positivism and idealism, empiricism and metaphysics.