Enchanted Aesthetic Lineages and Queer Intersubjectivity: Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, and Virginia Woolf

Though Virginia Woolf’s interest in the fantastic certainly makes itself most obvious in the fantastical biography Orlando (1928), this article argues that Woolf engages the fantastic across her writing, developing her version of what Max Weber defines as ‘enchantment’ to demonstrate that the ordinary – what Woolf in her 1925 essay ‘Modern Fiction’ refers to as ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ – is enchanted with extraordinary potential. Woolf helps the reader uncover this knowledge specifically to reorient us to what we think we know about the world, leading us to ultimately question its underlying structures and further examine the nature of human life, subjectivity, and how we are all connected. I trace ‘enchantment’ from Walter Pater through the interventions of Vernon Lee – a woman writer associated with the aestheticism of the 1890’s who took up Pater’s aesthetic praxis and shaped it to uniquely capture a queer feminist sensibility in ways that reached even more apparently toward the fantastic to engage with the supernatural, religious, and mythological. Pairing Vernon Lee’s object story ‘Oke of Okehurst’ (1886) alongside Woolf’s essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (1927), I argue that Woolf further develops Lee’s re-working of Paterian aesthetic perception to reveal the enchanted nature of the ordinary, questioning how subjectivity is formed, while also working to establish connection between subjectivities. Tracking the lineage of Woolf back through a network of women writers influenced by Pater demonstrates the central role of enchantment in Woolf’s work, as well as the way Woolf builds upon the Paterian mechanism of a heightened perception to the everyday in her writing to imagine ways of forging connection in the modern world.