Faded ink: The material trace of handwriting in neo-victorian fiction

Abstract

Neo-Victorian novelists reimagine handwritten documents to feed contemporary nostalgia for the materiality of handwriting. Handwriting signifies the personal and the private in ways that seem threatened in a digital age. Writers like Andrea Barrett, A. S. Byatt, and Peter Carey map material pathways to the nineteenth century with fictional characters who strive to possess the written past. Archival fantasies are simulated by novelists depicting writing processes and subsequent discovery and rereading of the handwritten trace by later generations. Imagined scenes of reading and writing describe tactile traces of handwriting that stage possession of the Victorian body in fragmented and partially recoverable states. Resurrection of the desired Victorian body through a metonymical relationship of hand/handwriting evokes a sense of a partial past recovered and experienced. Part of the aestheticism of the past relies on the aura of documents worn to a trace to evidence time and decay. Discovering the handwritten trace in this way becomes a sensory experience for readers and descriptions of decayed materiality emphasise survival for imagined fragments. Contemporary writing thus reveals a dual purpose to aestheticise the material past whilst demonstrating a postmodern drive to refute closure and ultimately celebrate the indeterminate facets of the handwritten trace.