SOME THINGS ARE BETTER LEFT UNSAID: THE DARK CLUE OR THE PERILOUS PATH OF A NEO-VICTORIAN NOVEL
SOME THINGS ARE BETTER LEFT UNSAID: THE DARK CLUE OR THE PERILOUS PATH OF A NEO-VICTORIAN NOVEL

Summary/Abstract: Rewriting the Victorians means recovering the most ponderous literary tradition while making use of modern awareness. Under the surface of respectful hypocrisy, novel characters often hide a more uncomfortable truth which narrators wish to unveil. This is also the target of James Wilson’s The Dark Clue, where two characters ‘stolen’ from Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Walter Hartright and his sister-in-law, Marian Halcombe, are engaged in a research on the famous British painter Turner. Their ambition is to write Turner’s biography; however, their study turns out to be a real investigation of the several mysterious gaps in the painter’s life. This study aims at examining the novel through the psychoanalytic paradigm of sublimation.

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