A return to the imaginary: Psychoanalysis and travel in Vernon Lee's travel essays

Abstract

This article examines Vernon Lee's travel essays and suggests that if, for the nineteenth-century woman, traveling opened up the possibilityof transgressing national and gender boundaries, for Lee, such movements across boundaries have included psychic ones. Arrival in a foreign land is much like a return to the unconscious, the land of the Imaginary where a split subjectivity may be "healed," and in Lee's travel essays there is a constant enactment of such a pattern. However, much as Vernon Lee sees herself as different from other women travelers and exempt from the impositions of patriarchy and the Symbolic Order, her attempt to return to the Imaginary and its narcissistic wholeness cannot in the end be sustained.