There was only my longing – and hers, which so resembled it, it seemed my own” (348). However, the ultimate failure of Margaret’s desires to materialise, and the revelation that she has been the unwitting victim of a plot on the part of Selina and her own maid, constitute a devastating culmination to the narrative both for Margaret and the reader who has become affectively identified with her: “There never was a cord of darkness, never a space in which our spirits touched. Margaret’s journals record her growing conviction in the spiritualist doctrine of ‘affinity’ and in the possibility of the supernatural materialisation of Selina’s body out of the confines of Millbank prison.
Recovering from a suicide attempt following the marriage of her former female lover, Margaret seeks to lose herself in charitable work as a prison visitor however, she finds in Selina Dawes, an imprisoned spiritualist medium, not only the rekindled possibility of reciprocated desire but also a language through which to express it. Moreover, Margaret’s apparitional indeterminacy as a ‘spinster’ can be interpreted as revealing the contradictions inherent in a very differently constituted invisibility: the normative ‘invisibility’ of heterosexuality.
The protagonist of Affinity, Margaret Prior, discloses an apprehension that she is “becoming own ghost” (289) rather than recuperate the apparitional as the spectral trace of a suppressed identity awaiting restoration to visibility, I will argue that it reveals the implication of categories of sexual identity in heteronormative regimes of visibility.
However, I wish to explore the ways in which the narrative ofAffinity confounds the very desires which it seems to evoke: that is, the way in which it refuses to satisfy the desire of the contemporary reader for the retrospective materialisation into late Victorian existence of lesbian identity. The prominence of the ‘ghostly’ in Affinity, Sarah Waters’s 1991 neo-Victorian gothic fiction of female same sex desire, might be read as a fantastic fictional evocation of a recurring trope in lesbian feminist literary history and historiography: the historical ‘invisibility’ of lesbian identity.
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