Parodia, nostalgia y memoria cultural: el nuevo (meta) realismo de Sarah Waters en Fingersmith (2002)

Abstract

This paper is part of a comprehensive research work focusing on Neo-Victorianism and the uses of nostalgia and subversion in Anglophone postmillennial novels.  This particular presentation hinges on an exploration of Fingersmith (2002), a novel which Sarah Waters sets in the Victorian era by means of a style which Kohlke has called new(meta)realism. The faux-Victorian context of Fingersmith vindicates the sensation genre, the conventions of which it first invokes but later partially subverts through thematic concerns which are alien to that genre in order to launch a project aimed at rectifying the absence of a representation of lesbianism in nineteenth-century literature. Fingersmith’s style parodies the historical record’s deliberate concealment of what Hayden White has referred to as emplotment, but it does not indict such occlusion in the vociferous ways of historiographic metafiction. Instead, the text imitates the concealment of emplotment through a counterfactual tale that camouflages its own fictionality and its own (contemporary) moment of production. Thus the novel expands cultural memory – collectively shared and linked to the identity of a lesbian subjectivity – by taking recourse to verisimilitude.  Far from interrogating the sensation novel subgenre, it reutilizes its transgressive energy to carry out an act of restorative justice. The novel is imbued with a nostalgic yearning – of a reflexive nature and pervaded by a spirit of disillusionment with respect to the present – which produces a utopian re-enchantment with writing strategies characteristic of Victorian literature. Such features are directly related to authorial powers which are perceived as having become diluted in the contemporary world. As a technology of memory, the novel proposes a paradigm in direct opposition to historiographic metafiction.