Anthony Domestico

Magic Lanterns and the Modernist Novel

The figure of the magic lantern has a pervasive presence within modernist literature.  Besides T.S. Eliot’s use of the figure in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the magic lantern appears in crucial scenes in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Dubliners, in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, in several novels by D.H. Lawrence, and in the letters of W.B. Yeats.  Why would modernists continue to represent this increasingly antiquated technology in some of their works’ most pivotal scenes?  How do these representations differ from uses of the magic lantern in Victorian novels?  Finally, why would an instrument that was so thoroughly enmeshed with mass culture and the visual be appropriated by writers concerned with individual subjectivity and inward experience?

In this paper, I will focus on two major modernist novels – James’s What Maisie Knew and Proust’s Swann’s Way – and explore how and why these writers used the magic lantern as a symbol within their path-breaking works.  I will argue that the magic lantern proved such an effective symbol largely because its method of projection seemed to involve aesthetic issues particularly resonant with the modernist novel: the relation between subjective perception and objective reality, the material nature (and limitations) of artistic creation, and the overlaying of different identities and temporalities within a single moment.  A ghost of the Victorian past, the magic lantern came to stand in for the ways in which this past could both be used and rejected, appropriated and disavowed.

Anthony Domestico is currently an English PhD. student at Yale University.  His interests include the novel, modernism’s sacramental vision of reality, and Russian literary influences on 20th-century Anglophone writers.  His essays have appeared inCommonweal and the New Haven Review.