![]() ![]() 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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