Louisa Yates

Missing Parties: Projecting Lesbian Desire in Sarah Waters’ Affinity

The novels of British writer Sarah Waters are noted for their homonormative articulations of same-sex relationships, which evolve in extraordinary environments. Affinity, the second of her novels to be published, follows the tale of upper-class Margaret Prior, a spinster who is conflicted about her role in an archetypal restrictive late-Victorian society. The narrative is set in heavily-populated, restrictive environments, characterised by their reliance on surveillance: the Victorian drawing room, London’s Millbank Prison, and the séance, hosted by the novel’s second narrator, trance medium Selina Dawes.

Despite the prominent surveillance techniques, the apparently closed environments throng with secret exits, daring escapes, and shadowy societies. The form of the novel itself, a multi-strand narrative, relies on ellipses, hints, and misdirection. The two protagonists are often mentally absent: Margaret due to a heavy consumption of laudanum, Selina through an ability to communicate with spirits. Absences are contrary to Affinity’s genre – Paulina Palmer points out that ‘Gothic, like the sign “lesbian”, tends to inscribe excess’1 Certainly, the surroundings in which the two women move are theatrically excessive. Endlessly panoptic prison corridors; claustrophobic drawing rooms; the stifling darkness of a séance or closet: settings that invite subjects to lose themselves.

Yet Affinity’s narrative tension is related to absence rather than excess. Who is the mysterious ‘spirit guide’, Peter Quick? What exactly happens in the darkened drawing room? Such mysteries are, in turn, closely linked to the transgressive figure of the woman who desires other women. In this paper I shall argue that, far from being excessive and thus easily traced, lesbian desire is projected into an absence and on to an absent figure.

Louisa Yates has just completed a MA in English Literature at Cardiff University and is now a Gladstone Fellow of the University of Chester, where she also lectures in critical theory. She is currently researching a PhD in neo-Victorian literature’s complex interaction with contemporary literary theory, and the notion of space in neo-Victorian literature.