Happy Existentialist Metaphors: Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh of the World and the Chandos Complex

This article investigates the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world. This concept brings a cosmological tone to existentialist phenomenology and challenges the grim and gnostic approach that prevails in Heidegger’s and Sartre’s works in particular. Is horror the key mood in ontology as argued by Malabou? This article contends that bright metaphors and magic realism are at least as fundamental, but under one condition: ontology must come to terms with what the author has coined as the “Chandos complex”, namely a form of ambivalence and oscillation between Gnosticism and holism that makes both positions fake and hollow. Dreaming of being one with the world and fantasizing an estrangement from nature work hand in hand and are equally staged. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy occasionally falls prey to the Chandos complex, which makes his concept of the flesh of the world vulnerable to criticism. This article examines the claim put forward by Renaud Barbaras that “the flesh of the world” is a failed metaphor. It argues that this blissful metaphor is ontologically fundamental as soon as its intrinsic paradoxes are recognized and accepted: the Chandos complex then becomes the key to an ontology that recognizes the imaginary as an essential dimension of being. At stake is an essential link between ontology on the one hand and, on the other hand, metaphors as well as myth-building and narrative-building processes.

From Crisis to Compensation: Reinventing Identity and Place in the Sideshow and the Laboratory

Examining the ambivalent place of the sideshow and the laboratory within Victorian culture and its reimaginings, this essay explores the contradiction between the narratively orchestrating role and peripheral location of the sideshow in Leslie Parry’s Church of Marvels (2015) and the laboratory in NBC’s Dracula (2013–2014), reading these neo-Victorian spaces as heterotopias, relational places simultaneously belonging to and excluded from the dominant social order. These spaces’ impacts on individual identity illustrate this uneasy relationship. Both the sideshow and the laboratory constitute sites of resignification, emerging as “crisis heterotopias” or sites of passage: in Parry’s novel, the sideshow allows the Church twins to embrace their unique identities, surpassing the limitations of their physical resemblance; in Dracula, laboratory experiments reverse Dracula’s undead condition. Effecting reinvention, these spaces reconfigure the characters’ senses of belonging, propelling them to places beyond their confines, and thus projecting the latter’s heterotopic qualities onto the city. Potentially harmful, yet opening up urban space to include identities which are considered aberrant, these relocations envision the city as a “heterotopia of compensation”: an alternative, possibly idealized, space that reifies the sideshow’s and the laboratory’s attempts to achieve greater extroversion and visibility for their liminal occupants, thus fostering neo-Victorianism’s outreach efforts to support the disempowered.

Heterotopian Disorientation: Intersectionality in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth

This article reads William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to explore the film’s ambivalent gender and racial politics. The country house that Katherine Lester is locked away in forms a quasi-heterotopia, mediated through a disorienting cinematography of incarceration. Although she manages to transgress the ideological boundaries surrounding her, she simultaneously contributes to the oppression of her Black housemaid, Anna. On the one hand, the film suggests that the coercive space of the colony—another Foucauldian heterotopia—may threaten white hegemony: While Mr Lester’s Black, illegitimate son Teddy almost manages to claim his inheritance and, hence, contest the racialised master/servant relationship of the country house, Anna’s voice threatens to cause Katherine’s downfall. On the other hand, through eventually denying Anna’s and Teddy’s agency, Lady Macbeth exposes the pervasiveness of intersectional forms of oppression that are at play in both Victorian and twenty-first-century Britain. The constant spatial disorientation that the film produces, this article suggests, not only identifies blind spots in Foucault’s writings on heterotopian space as far as intersectionality is concerned, but also speaks to white privilege as a vital concern of both twenty-first-century feminism and neo-Victorian criticism.

Heterotopic Heritage in Hong Kong: Tai Kwun and Neo-Victorian Carceral Space

The prison is specifically identified by Michel Foucault in his essay, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), as an exemplar of “heterotopias of deviation”. Reified in neo-Victorian production as a hegemonic space to be resisted, within which illicit desire, feminist politics, and alternate narratives, for example, flourish under harsh panoptic conditions, the prison nonetheless emerges as a counter-site to both nineteenth-century and contemporary social life. This article investigates the neo-Victorian prison museum that embodies several of Foucault’s heterotopic principles and traits from heterochronia to the dynamics of illusion, compensation/exclusion and inclusion that structure the relationship of heterotopic space to all space. Specifically, I explore the heritage site of the Central Police Station compound in Hong Kong, recently transformed into “Tai Kwun: the Centre for Heritage and the Arts”. Tai Kwun (“Big Station” in Cantonese) combines Victorian and contemporary architecture, carceral space, contemporary art, and postcolonial history to herald the transformation of Hong Kong into an international arts hub. Tai Kwun is an impressive example of neo-Victorian adaptive reuse, but its current status as a former prison, art museum, and heritage space complicates the celebratory aspects of heterotopia as counter-site. Instead, Tai Kwun’s spatial, historical, and financial arrangements emphasize the challenges that tourism, government funding, heritage, and the art industry pose for Foucault’s original definition of heterotopia and our conception of the politics of neo-Victorianism in the present.

Heterotopic and Neo-Victorian Affinities: Introducing the Special Issue on Neo-Victorian Heterotopias

The introduction to this special issue on Neo-Victorian Heterotopias investigates the affinities between the spaces designated by Michel Foucault’s ambivalent and protean concept of ‘heterotopia’ and the similarly equivocal, shifting, and adaptable cultural phenomenon of ‘neo-Victorianism’. In both cases, cultural spaces and/or artefacts prove deeply intertwined with chronicity, at once juxtaposing and blending different temporal moments, past and present. Socially produced sites of distinct emplacement are exposed not just as culturally and historically contingent constructs, but simultaneously enable forms of resistance to the prevailing ideologies that call them into being. The fertile exercise of considering heterotopias and neo-Victorianism in conjunction opens up new explorations of the Long Nineteenth Century and its impact on today’s cultural imaginary, memory and identity politics, contestations of systemic historical iniquities, and engagements with forms of difference, non-normativity, and Otherness.

Neo-Victorianism as a Cemetery: Heterotopia and Heterochronia in Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels and Audrey Neffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry

This article examines the nature of neo-Victorianism as a heterotopia and heterochronia, that is, situatedness where the relationship between the past and the present is paradoxically concurrent and palimpsestic. This is done via a discussion of the cemetery as a governing metaphor to describe neo-Victorianism, as it is a highly heterotopic and heterochronic space. A hauntological approach is applied to interpret the attempt to bury the spectre of Victorianism in Michel de Certeau’s “scriptural tombs” as the main project of neo-Victorianism. Two neo-Victorian novels, Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels (2001) and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry (2009), are selected as illustrations of this phenomenon, as they both focus on Highgate Cemetery in London as a key element of their narratives. Both these texts show that neo-Victorianism, conceptualised as a cemetery, is a heterotopic and heterochronic archive of the spectres that rarely stay buried in their narrative tombs.

“The World Had Forgotten about Us”: Heterotopian Resistance in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip

This article explores how the different forms of heterotopias present in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008) and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006) articulate problematic identity politics and cultural memory. In Wanting, the collocation of Mathinna’s story with that of the lost Franklin expedition offers a form of reclaiming. This article argues that Flanagan’s novel moves from heterotopias of deviation to a crisis heterotopia, displacing and debunking the compensation function of the colonial heterotopia to highlight the crushing of Aboriginal identity. This shifting heterotopia is doubled by Mathinna’s heterotopic carceral body, that is, body as confined space, which qualifies the act of reclaiming. In Mister Pip, heterotopias concern cultural memory as the island of Bougainville, secluded from the rest of the world, turns into the repository of the villagers’ culture juxtaposed with the reading of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1861). This article argues that Jones’s creation of a palimpsestic heterotopia allows him to resist Eurocentric views as well as to actualize postcolonial concepts. Jones’s novel calls for a dynamic appropriation of literature. Matilda’s ‘Pacific version’ of Pip’s story reflects the cracks in the Victorian and contemporary exploitations of the island. Readers’ immersions in these heterotopias do not provide an escape from but a thoughtful commitment to the past.

Heterotopic Proliferation in E. S. Thomson’s Jem Flockhart Series

This article explores the convergence, inversion, and collapse of heterotopic spaces in E. S. Thomson’s neo-Victorian Jem Flockhart series about a cross-dressing female apothecary in mid-nineteenth-century London. The eponymous first-person narrator becomes embroiled in the detection of horrific murder cases, with the action traversing a wide range of Michel Foucault’s exemplary Other spaces, including hospitals, graveyards, brothels, prisons, asylums, and colonies, with the series substituting the garden for Foucault’s ship as the paradigmatic heterotopia. These myriad juxtaposed sites, which facilitate divergence from societal norms while seemingly sequestering forms of alterity and resistance, repeatedly merge into one another in Thomson’s novels, destabilising distinct kinds of heterotopias and heterotopic functions. Jem’s doubled queerness as a cross-dressing lesbian beloved by their Watsonean side-kick, the junior architect William Quartermain, complicates the protagonist’s role in helping readers negotiate the re-imagined Victorian metropolis and its unequal power structures. Simultaneously defending/reaffirming and contesting/subverting the status quo, Jem’s body itself becomes a microcosmic heterotopia, problematising the elision of agency in Foucault’s conceptualisation of the term. The proliferation of heterotopias in Thomson’s series suggests that neo-Victorian fiction reconfigures the nineteenth century into a vast network of confining, contested, and liberating Other spaces.

Their Own Devices: Steampunk Airships as Heterotopias of Crisis and Deviance

Michel Foucault uses a sailing vessel as the exemplar of his theory of heterotopia because of its mobility. The lateral and vertical mobility of the steampunk airship indicates the potential for an even greater exemplar of heterotopia, particularly of Foucault’s defining principles of heterotopic crisis and deviance. These principles are explored onboard the steampunk airships of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy and Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series, resulting in travel towards progressive social frontiers of gender and race. The protagonists of the Leviathan trilogy move from a position of crisis to deviance, as mediated through the friendship and romance of two representatives of warring factions. In contrast, the heroine of the Finishing School series moves from deviance to crisis as she navigates the vagaries of gender and racial identity. These airship heterotopias of young adult fiction, which not only descend geographically but also socially, cross liminal crisis spaces of class, race, gender, and identity to craft literary cartographies for these social frontiers, providing readers with literary maps for their uncertain real worlds of crisis.

Young Adult Crisis Heterotopias and Feminist Revisions in Colleen Gleason’s Stoker and Holmes Series

In this article, we investigate neo-Victorian YA fiction’s efforts to mirror twenty-first-century feminist ideals in nineteenth-century spaces through examining the role of heterotopia in Colleen Gleason’s Stoker and Holmes series (2013–2019). We first consider how the novels’ steampunk elements figure in Gleason’s feminist framing of neo-Victorian London, particularly in terms of common heterotopias—primarily the garden and the museum—that the protagonists briefly navigate over the course of the series. Second, we explore how the series’ three female protagonists each occupy spaces that function as pseudo—“heterotopias of crisis”—that is, while each of them claims space within which to subvert expectations of women, these spaces and the activities they support are themselves fundamentally insular and yield no socio-cultural critique. Finally, we consider how the spaces created and occupied by the books’ villain, known as the Ankh, serve as heterotopias. We find that the fact that the only truly heterotopic spaces in the novels belong to the villain, whose transgressive deviance the series frames as a bridge too far, illustrates how disappointingly limited neo-Victorian YA can be in its ability to offer subversive mirrors to twenty-first-century feminism.