Summary
One of the dominant concerns of postmodern writing is to discuss the importance and modes of 
knowing the past. $e aim of this paper is to explore how the British novelist A.S. Byatt rereads 
the Victorian past in her novella “$e Conjugal Angel” by using Victorian spiritualism as a 
multilayered metaphor for dynamic communication between the past and present. Spiritualist 
rituals will also be read as a cultural practice characterised by the playful undermining of gender 
roles and norms. Finally, the paper will discuss spiritualist séances as a metaphor for the writing 
and reading of historiographic metafiction seen as a process of restless summoning of and intense 
communicating with the ghosts/texts from the past.     
Key words: A.S. Byatt, “!e Conjugal Angel,” gender norms, historiographic metafiction, 
metaphor, postmodernism, spiritualism, séance.  
 Povzetek
Eno poglavitnih zanimanj postmodernega pisanja je proučevanje pomembnosti in načinov 
poznavanja preteklosti. Članek se ukvarja z raziskovanjem obravnave viktorijanske preteklosti v noveli 
»Zakonski angel« izpod peresa britanske avtorice A.S. Byatt, ki vpeljuje viktorijanski spiritualizem 
kot mnogoplastno metaforo za vzpostavitev dinamične povezave med sedanjostjo in preteklostjo. 
Spiritualni obredi so med drugim predstavljeni tudi kot del kulture, ki jo zaznamuje igrivo 
spodkopavanje spolnih vlog in norm. Nazadnje se članek posveti spiritualnim seansam kot metafori 
za pisanje in branje zgodovinopisne metafikcije, ki jo razume kot nenehno prizivanje duhov/besedil iz 
preteklosti in kot tesno komunikacijo z njimi. 
 
Ključne besede: A.S. Byatt, “Zakonski angel”, spolne norme, zgodovinopisna metafikcija, 
metafora, postmodernizem, spiritualnost, seansa 
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.7.1.73-85

In a world profoundly saturated with theories of self-referentiality of language and literature, A. 
S. Byatt may equally claim the status of an anachronism and an embodiment of postmodern 
eccentricities and complexities. Specifically, on the one hand, Byatt instinctively rejects the alienation 
and forced enclosure of language and literature as they are elaborated by postmodern literary 
theory and chooses instead the warm comfort of the past which celebrates identity of thought 
and language. Her curious clinging to what is commonly known as the idea of “undissociated 
sensibility,” as well as her obsession with metaphors as flowers which engender her multilayered 
novels, earn her the status of an anachronism, or even a nostalgist, in an age that mercilessly dissects 
these remnants of the past out of recognition. On the other hand, both in her novels and critical 
essays Byatt casually but extremely knowledgeably flirts with various branches of literary theory, 
thus changing her allegiance from an erudite advocate of tradition to an agent of postmodern and 
poststructuralist literary theory in disguise. It is in the context of these oppositions that I propose 
to discuss her writing and reading of the Victorian past through spiritualist séances.   
Byatt casually experiments with the notion of spiritualism in her highly acclaimed Possession by 
composing the poem “Mummy Possesst” which, unlike its Browningesque model “Mr Sludge, 
the Medium,” celebrates the power of female mediums. However, it is only in her novella “$e 
Conjugal Angel,” published as part of a collection titled Angles and Insects, that she unleashes the 
remarkable potential, both thematic and metaphorical, of spiritualist séances so as to approach 
the Victorian period through its greatest fears and obsessions. Although in her critical essays on 
Victorian culture Byatt often invokes the definition of spiritualism as a new religion in an age 
of materialism, she, nevertheless, uncovers, in these secretive controversial rituals, a place where 
the material and spiritual world are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Furthermore, apart from 
using the subversive energy of spiritualism to reconstruct a period of intense spiritual crisis and 
attempts made to overcome its looming spectre, Byatt recognizes in séances a powerful metaphor 
of liminality, which activates intense rethinking of some of the key oppositions in “$e Conjugal 
Angel” such as presence/absence, fact/fiction, sensual/textual experience of the Victorian reality, 
subject/form and many others. 
$e first part of this paper will try to elucidate the aforementioned aspects of séance through 
an analysis of metaphoric nature of language and in reference to Paul Ricoeur’s discussion 
of living metaphor and the iconic element of metaphor, thus once again juxtaposing Byatt’s 
postmodern and Victorian identities and allegiances. $e dominance of female mediums in 
“$e Conjugal Angel” and Alfred T ennyson’s emotional breakdown under the weight of Arthur 
Hallam’s presence in his poem “In Memoriam” open the space for discussion of instability of 
Victorian gender norms in the second part. Finally, bearing in mind that all the aforementioned 
oppositions and discussions related to spiritualism are enacted through Byatt’s masterful staging 

of the textual encounter of the nineteenth and late twentieth century, I will read “$e Conjugal 
Angel” as an example of “textual haunting” (Wolfreys 2002, ix) in literature. In other words, the 
spiritualist séance will be considered as a metaphor for the writing and reading of historiographic 
metafiction seen as a process of restless summoning of and intense communicating with the 
ghosts/texts from the past.     
 Séance in “$e Conjugal Angel” is a fascinating fusion of the spiritual and material experience of 
death which is exquisitely rendered through Byatt’s delicate postmodern irony. Although a superficial 
perception of the Victorian cultural and spiritual life may suggest the existence of antagonism 
between science and spiritualism and define the craving for communication with ghosts as an 
impulsive response to the impersonality of science, Alex Owen convincingly claims the opposite in 
her influential book #e Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England 
(1989). She writes that the need to communicate with the dead was undeniably fuelled by the 
desire to overcome the fear of the mere physicality and the materiality of human existence, in 
addition to attempting to provide scientific evidence for life after death. By analogy, séances were 
seen as experiments in controlled conditions where conversation and exchange of messages with 
the departed constituted an empirical procedure whereby the materiality of soul, or so-called spirit 
matter, was firmly established after the death of the body. Accordingly, Owen indicates in her 
introduction that spiritualist literature speaks of “test séances” and “test conditions” in order to lend 
respectability to the evidence of the spirit’s survival after death. Supporters of spiritualism largely 
appropriated the language of materialism, which gave their beliefs credibility and made them visible 
within the social and cultural space dominated by the philosophy of materialism. 
Byatt weaves these ideas into her novella and fastens them to its vibrant Victorian core by means 
of playful postmodern intrusions which unmistakably reveal her narrative stitches without 
diminishing the reader’s pleasure. A fine example of this is the conversation between two séance 
participants, Captain Jesse, Emily T ennyson Jesse’s husband, and Mr Hawke, a “theological 
connoisseur” (1992, 166), about the noxious effects of Swedenborg’s incessant coffee-drinking 
on his communication with spirits. 
… God made the world, and therefore everything in it, including, I suppose, the coffee-
bush and the coffee-bean. If coffee disposes to clear-seeing, I do not see that the means 
injures the end. No doubt seers are as regular fabrics as crystals, and not a drug or berry 
is omitted from their build, when it is wanted. We live in a material time, Captain Jesse 
– apart from metaphysics, the time is gone by when anything is made out of nothing. If the 
visions are good visions, their material origin is also good, I think. Let the visions criticise 
the coffee and vice-versa (167).
$e spiritual crisis in the nineteenth century was largely caused by Darwin’s theory of evolution 
which dethroned man from his dignified position in the Chain of Being and tied him irrevocably 

to the lower links in the chain by means of the “T ree of Life.” $us deprived of the comforting 
vicinity of angels and the sphere of pure spirituality, many Victorians took passionate interest 
in the world of spirits in order to regain their lost spirituality, even if it meant allowing for a 
curious compatibility of their occult rituals and the emerging scientific ideology. Byatt beautifully 
captures this advance of man on the realm of the dead in her novella and demonstrates how it 
turns into a dead race where séance attendees eagerly claim their portion of an alternative reality. 
On the other hand, Darwin’s use of the biblical metaphor of the tree of life clearly indicates that 
scientific discourse cannot be cleansed of traces of religious discourse; it cannot control its own 
metaphoricity since very often the terms on which science is based happen to be metaphors whose 
figurative nature has long been forgotten. It is precisely these contradictions and intertwinements 
that constitute the phenomenon of séance as a cultural practice and a multilayered metaphor.  
Victorian spiritualists found their inspiration mostly in the works of Emanuel Swedenborg 
(1688–1772), a Swedish scientist, philosopher and mystic, whose ideas are deeply rooted in 
the text of “$e Conjugal Angel.” In his Heaven and Hell Swedenborg emphasizes that man is 
a spirit in human form, whereas the body only serves the spirit as an instrument. Furthermore, 
the spiritual part of man represents whatever is living and sensitive in man and that is why man 
continues to live even when the body is separated from the spirit by the act of dying, whereas, on 
the other hand, those who are still alive in their bodies can converse with the departed precisely 
on account of their living spiritual connection. It is known that, apart from theology, Swedenborg 
took a keen interest in science in the age of Isaac Newton. His scientific and empirical research 
seems to have curiously resurfaced in his mystic teaching as a firm belief in man’s ability to retain 
human form and sharp senses of sight, hearing and, particularly, touch even after he leaves the 
material world (1758/1885, 228–32). $us, the soul demonstrates its so-called matter quality 
and spiritualists have the genuine ability to see, hear, and touch the spirits. 
$ese ideas are more than knowingly transposed in “$e Conjugal Angel” through Byatt’s 
delightful invocation of the metaphorical power of language. Her medium in the novella, Sophy 
Sheekhy, is an ethereal, almost transparent creature who lulls herself into trance by chanting 
Keats’s poems and passages from the Bible, especially the hymn-like words from St Paul’s anecdote 
in II Corinthians 12, “whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot 
tell: God knoweth” until all the words “were mad and bristling with shiny glass hairs, and then 
very simple and meaningless, like clear drops of water.” Her smooth transition from spiritual and 
textual liminality into the palpable materiality of words accounts for the fact that “the creatures 
and objects called up by poems and the Bible, or the creatures which came from nowhere and 
stayed awhile, could be described to other people, seen, smelled, heard, almost touched and 
tasted – some were sweet, some were smoky” (1992, 192). 
$e liminal area between reality and fiction, or between the power of words to address things 
and/or some indefinable warm space within themselves, is where Byatt locates “$e Conjugal 
Angel.” Since liminality seems to be taken as a given, Byatt refuses to question the authenticity 
of Sophy Sheekhy’s mediumship when soon after, in a rather bizarre manner, the dead Arthur 
Hallam and the living Alfred T ennyson appear to her since “what finally matters is not that they 

were images of the real, but that they were real images” (Levenson 2001, 166). Instead, Byatt 
focuses all her narrative energy on reconstructing the amazing moment when Sophy chants “$e 
Eve of St Agnes” and “Ode to a Nightingale” to summon Hallam, the artist whose premature 
death turned into a national memorial and one of the most beautiful and intriguing poems in 
English literature, “In Memoriam.” 
However, their communication is not exhausted by a mere textual exchange. On the contrary, it 
reaches its full intensity and materiality when Sophy instinctively clings to Hallam’s cold body and 
words turn into touches, cold ghastly touches with which our conscious being tries to comprehend 
and possess death. In that moment T ennyson “appears” before Sophy and Byatt materializes him 
through the strong tobacco scent which always surrounded him, but now it crushes everything 
under its formidable stale weight: “Perhaps he stank? He lifted the ends of his fingers to his nostrils. 
He heard the buzzing of little flying fragments of language that hung around his head all the time in 
a cloud, like the veils of living and dead smoke” (1992, 254). Invoking T ennyson’s presence through 
the smell of tobacco subtly summons new metaphors so that whiffs of smoke transform into flying 
fragments of language, or winged angels, which leads us to the powerful metaphor contained in the 
title of the novella. $us Byatt’s metaphor-ridden mind transforms the “ruling” metaphor of séance 
not into abstract truths, as one may expect, but into more metaphors (Poznar 2004). Uncanny 
visions and morbid encounters with the spirits of the dead are reconstructed as mental conditions 
teeming with life and it is this protean metaphoric dimension of séance that enables the reader to 
inhabit simultaneously several planes of reality. 
Byatt’s understanding of the metaphorical nature of language is discussed in her much praised 
collection of essays Passions of the Mind (1993), whose very title indicates her infatuation with 
the sensuousness of language.
I don’t know how much is known about the difference between those who think with mental 
imagery and those who don’t. I very much do – I see any projected piece of writing or work 
as a geometric structure: various colours and patterns. I see other people’s metaphors – if 
there is an iconic content to a metaphor I will “see” a visual image on some inner mental 
screen, which can then be contemplated more precisely, described discursively (the sap 
rising inside Milton’s “light” green stalk, like light) (7). 
Although her erudite critical and literary writings (very often it is impossible to distinguish one 
from the other), which move insouciantly from painting and literature to insect societies, may 
often appear intimidating, Byatt manages to convince even her sadly uninitiated readers of the 
truthfulness of her coloured, moving, densely textured words. $at is what happens when the 
reader visualizes her words “mad and bristling with shiny glass hairs, and then very simple and 
meaningless, like clear drops of water” (1992, 192) and allows himself to be taken into her 
darkened rooms for séances. 
Byatt’s metaphors are not exhausted in their immediate expression, which explains her fascination 
with Ricoeur’s elaboration on the iconic element in metaphors. Namely, iconic representation can 

point towards original resemblances, whether of quality, structure or locality, of situation, or, finally, 
of feeling (1975/2007, 224). Accordingly, those previously mentioned “flying” metaphors, begotten 
by the smoke of T ennyson’s cigar, open up as concentric circles which eventually revert only to meet 
again in the living metaphor of séance, which thus encompasses all the anxieties, illusions, and 
beauties of the Victorian mind. Byatt’s séance is a place and mode of mourning and remembering, 
and an attempt to both challenge and accommodate the impersonal scientific version of the Biblical 
history; it is a place where woman’s “innate passivity” unexpectedly transforms her into a perfectly 
receptive medium between two worlds, and finally, it is a place where the power of language to 
resurrect the long forgotten meanings and awaken resemblances through the intense rereading of 
“In Memoriam,” in particular, is more than fully achieved. $us séance becomes what Ricoeur 
calls a “living metaphor” (225), which demands the reader to follow its clues and identify manifold 
parallel meanings, uncover the buried sensuality underneath complex cultural layers and thus, feel 
a genuine pleasure in an enhanced experience of the past. 
$at séance is indeed a living metaphor is ingeniously hinted at through the lively character of 
Mrs Lilias Papagay, a widow in straitened circumstances. Her mediumistic powers are limited 
to automatic writing, which is in her case also a viable source of income. $is incredibly earthy 
woman is fully aware of the new knowledge with which man has unravelled the secrets of both 
heaven and earth, that is to say the stars and the remote exotic lands of Australia and New 
Zealand. Still, the advance of science and the colonisation of the Earth’s territories beyond the 
frontiers of the known do not convince her to relinquish the comfort of her personal angel too 
easily. However, it is not spiritual comfort or the confirmation of religious truths about the 
Hereafter that she craves and summons through her passive writing: “But it was not for that, she 
knew in her heart of hearts, that she travelled to séances, that she wrote and rapped and bellowed, 
it was for now, it was for more life now.” Unlike Sophy’s textual invocation of the spirit matter, 
Lilias consciously engages herself into this “traffic with the dead” (1992, 171) and openly claims 
possession over her own portion of the material world, whereby two aspects of reality are once 
again locked in a passionate embrace.   
 $e instability of gender roles is another aspect of Victorian life which resurfaces in Byatt’s 
séances. “Victorian ideology of femininity” established domesticity and motherhood as the only 
socially acceptable spheres for female activity, thus supporting the thesis of woman’s biological 
predetermination for the role of passive caretaker. Owen emphasizes that the notion of innate 
female passivity and the representation of femininity as unchanging were crucial for determining a 
woman’s place (1989, 7). However, in the context of spiritualist séances, a woman’s innate ability to 
renounce her own self proved to be vital for development of mediumistic powers. Moreover, female 
mediums freely transgressed gender norms during séances by assuming the position of authoritative 
guides and embracing dramatic and theatrical forms of behaviour. $is transgression was not met 
with disapproval since it was viewed as a part of the newly appropriated role of mediums (1989, 
11). $erefore, the Victorian ideology of femininity proved to be unable to control the dichotomies 
and gender divisions it initially installed and female mediums were given an opportunity, even if 

only for the duration of séance, to break free from the limited social space allocated to them upon 
birth, and freely cross the borders between the so-called male and female sphere.  
In “$e Conjugal Angel” three extraordinary women, Sophy Sheekhy, Lilias Papagay and 
Emily T ennyson Jesse, take an active part in spiritualist rituals. Byatt reconstructs séance as our 
unconscious being which does not recognize the mechanisms of our conscious being, or in this 
case of the Victorian gender norms, and allows the breakthrough of silenced female voices. Lilias 
Papagay intuitively hears these voices and turns them into stories. After the disappearance of 
her husband, Captain Papagay, in a sea storm, she finds herself in a very vulnerable and dubious 
social space, subject to various interpretations, given the fact that her husband’s death has never 
been confirmed. However, this endows her with an innate mediumistic ability or instinct to feel 
and hear untold stories and fantasies of other women present in séances. Lilias is thus positioned 
in an entirely liminal social space, which, amongst other things, enables her to be acutely aware 
of her own sexual needs as well as the sexual frustrations of the participants, even in the moments 
of most intense concentration when she is decoding the troubled messages of the deceased. In 
spite of Lilias’s authoritative position within the novella, Byatt’s postmodern ironic voice does 
not too easily allow the imposition of a new woman-dominated hierarchy at the expense of 
the existing male dominance, but simply exposes the essential fluidity of socially constructed 
dichotomies. Consequently, Lilias’s stories spun out of her spiritualist experiences prove to be 
“stilted, saccharine rubbish” (1992, 168) that no one would want to read, whereas her source of 
historical knowledge is Walter Scott’s romanticised representation of the past. 
Although this partly discredits her as a medium or mediator between the readers and the story, it, 
nevertheless, gives her a peculiar sort of materiality and liveliness in the obscurity of spiritualism, 
which enables the reader to perceive her as the only reliable guide in a story which constantly 
oscillates between reality and fiction, spiritual and physical reality. On the other hand, Lilias is a 
somewhat mischievous, not to say manipulative guide, for while holding the hands of expectant 
attendees and ushering them into the world of spirits, she initiates an eruption of obscenities 
through her passive writing, thus mocking and banalising Swedenborg’s concept of the conjugal 
angel i.e. heavenly marriage or what Tillyard identifies in Donne’s poetry as the unification of lovers 
in a single over-soul (1943/1970, 97). $e verses released through Lilias’s mediumship demonstrate 
what Owen recognizes as the “expressions of the unknowable, unutterable, and forbidden” or the 
“undermining [of] the normative connotations of feminine passivity” (1989, 215): 
$e Angel spreads his golden wings
And raises high his golden cock
And man and his wife together lock
Into one corpse that moans and sings (Byatt 1992, 286).
 
Sophy Sheekhy is the only genuine medium in “$e Conjugal Angel” because she incarnates the 
juxtaposition of two entirely opposite notions of femininity – the one, woman as a mere recipient 
of spirits’ energy and messages
1
 and the other, woman’s surrendering to surreal experience only to 
 “She was a pure vessel, cool, waiting dreamily” (Byatt 1992, 191).

re-emerge as an authoritative guide who uncovers in Arthur Hallam an immature boy underneath 
the image of the Victorian most worshipped and mythologized intellectual, or witnesses the 
emotional breakdown of the aged Alfred T ennyson.   
Further on, Byatt explores the instability of gender roles by reconsidering the ghost-like 
presence of T ennyson and his sister Emily in “In Memoriam.” $e entranced Sophy watches 
the weakened poet laureate as he clumsily tries to button his night shirt and at the same time 
relive his own poem through the words, “the spirit does mean but the breath” (1992, 268) 
whereby he intentionally invokes the original Latin meaning of the word “spiritus” (breath) 
only to make death transient. In other words, he uses language to overpower death in such a 
way that he dissolves the imminence of death into a mere breath while words are unexpectedly 
transformed into the feeling of eternal predatory intimacy which anticipates the pressing weight 
and discomfort of Hallam’s presence in his texts.  
... the truth was that both he and Arthur had seeped into his poem, had become parts of 
its fabric, a matter-moulded kind of half-life he sometimes thought it was, something not 
independent, but not part of each, not a handclasp, but a kind of vigorous parasite, like 
mistle-toe on dying oaks with its milky berries and its mysterious evergreen leaves (268). 
Sophy’s final awakening from the trance is preceded by Hallam’s desperate attempt to “feed 
off her life, ... invading the very fibre of her nerves with his death” (274) which, just like the 
previous passage, represents an utterly deromanticised image of death dominated by the parasitic 
relationship of the dead towards the memory of the living. Furthermore, a literal decomposing 
of Hallam’s body and the emotional pain of T ennyson which Byatt evokes through intensely 
realistic and tactile images, as well as her insistence on a faithful representation of the smells of 
not only death but also life, as in a description of Emily T ennyson Jesse’s dog who frequently 
imposes his presence during séances by releasing “a series of popping little farts, and a rich, 
decaying smell” (286), make death and life equally real, or unreal. 
$e interplay of textual, transcendental and physical reality develops as Byatt disperses fragments 
of “In Memoriam” throughout the chapter, thus reconstructing the relationship between Hallam 
and T ennyson in the context of not only T ennyson’s physical and spiritual suffering, but also his 
struggle with the uncontrollable sensuous metaphoricity and femininity of his language. It turns 
out that, regardless of T ennyson’s efforts to use language to comprehend the essence of death as a 
purely spiritual condition, he cannot subdue the materiality of words which mindlessly surrender 
to the bliss of touch. As the aged poet remembers young Hallam, words of “In Memoriam” 
conjure up images of male hands in fervent expectation of touch. $is transformation of words 
into palpable images of male hands on the verge of touching is also seen from the perspective 
of T ennyson’s sister and Hallam’s former fiancée, Emily Jesse. It is through Emily’s participation 
in séances that the reader can see how this expectation of touch is relocated from the forbidden 
sphere of the body to the socially acceptable sphere of unhindered artistic exchange where 
Hallam’s and T ennyson’s souls are truly joined in ecstatic blissful intimacy. 

Byatt moves Emily from her marginal textual position and reinvents her out of a glaring absence 
from biographies and poems so as to enable her to close off her past with Hallam and gain control 
over her life as Captain Jesse’s wife. During séances Emily adopts the role of an interpreter or 
decoder of all texts with which Hallam tries to communicate with her, but she is also determined 
in rejecting him as her half-angel and the forced widowhood and the mourning which inextricably 
tied them together. Nevertheless, she is never raised to the pedestal as an unfulfilled artist and 
an ignored genius, which Byatt explains in her On Histories and Stories (2001): “I found myself 
troubled about Emily T ennyson herself – she had a dry wit, in what letters of hers I had read, 
and a rhapsodic note I was less happy with” (105). In addition to that, “there was something 
unsavoury about Mrs Jesse, as well, of course, as something pure and tragic. …, she was like a 
weathered, watching head between gargoyles on a church roof” (Byatt 1992, 183). 
T o enable both Emily and her brother to face and exorcise the haunting presence of Hallam 
in their memory/texts, Byatt rereads Victorian views of femininity and masculinity through 
the subcultural phenomenon of séance by installing and dismantling gender-based binary 
oppositions and hierarchies and, consequently, unveiling the fluidity and artificiality of these 
socially constructed categories. Liminality as a psychological and cultural space in which séances 
thrive seems to be the natural habitat for femininity as a social construct. Julia Kristeva argues 
that women as marginal beings within the phallocentric symbolic order come to represent the 
necessary frontier between man and chaos. However, their marginality entitles that they occupy 
both sides of the frontier, plunging mindlessly in the darkness outside or receding into the 
safe inside, because of which “they share in the disconcerting properties of all frontiers” (Moi 
1985/2002, 166). Byatt’s mediums, who are both passive recipients and manipulative guides 
and interpreters of the messages from the realm of eternal darkness, embrace liminality as a 
mode of living as it allows them to seep through the pores of established social frontiers and thus 
undermine the foundations of the very ideology which begot them.     
 So far séance has been discussed as a metaphor which both generates and reconciles the clash of 
spirituality and materiality, draws attention to its own innate sensuousness and functions as a liminal 
social space in which Victorian gender norms are defied. In other words, séance has been largely 
treated as a subject matter of the novella which in itself questions the nature of matter and spirit. 
In the final part of this paper I intend to look at séance as a metaphor of a particular form, both 
in the sense of genre and narrative technique employed by the author. Namely, “$e Conjugal 
Angel” may, in many aspects, be classified under the postmodern literary genre of “historiographic 
metafiction” as it was defined by Linda Hutcheon because it maintains the difference between 
its formal auto-representation and its historical context, thereby openly problematising the very 
possibility of historical knowledge, offering no reconciliation but, quite the contrary, nurturing 
contradiction (1988/2005, 106). $is interaction of historiography and fiction raises several 
important issues, i.e. the nature of identity and subjectivity, reference and representation, 
intertextuality of the past and ideological implications of writing about history (117). 

When applied to Byatt’s novella, these postulates of postmodernism prove to be densely woven 
into the very fabric of the text. As far as the issue of subjectivity is concerned, Byatt’s narrator 
is seemingly traditional and omniscient, whereas the text actually allows for multiple points 
of view so that even ghosts and texts from the past address, sometimes even harass, the reader 
directly, and in doing so demonstrate the instability of the traditional concept of the narrator. 
Moreover, all séance attendees are equally anxious to interpret the voices coming from the other 
side of reality while the messages of the ghostly visitants exist only in the form and meaning 
rendered by more than often manipulative mediums. $e question of reference or the tendency 
of the language of texts to refer to a prior textualisation and not to an empirically real object is 
more than prominent in “$e Conjugal Angel.” Not only that, instead of real objects, the reader 
is referred to spectres and voices, but the most reliable referent to which the texts-as-characters 
point is a web of other texts subtly conjured through séances. Intertextuality, as an immanent 
feature of both fiction and history, is in Byatt’s case the medium through which the reader is 
expected to identify the spectres of other texts, while at the same time remaining keenly aware 
of the author’s playful interventions and casually dispersed borrowings. Lastly, the ideological 
implications inherent to historical fiction are openly problematised in the sense that Byatt does 
not bluntly invalidate Victorian views of sexuality, gender norms, science, and spiritualism, but 
she subtly subverts socially imposed dichotomies in order to unveil their inadequacy and point 
towards manifold unheard voices and alternative cultural practices. She, nevertheless, does not 
enclose her story within the borders of a newly established hierarchy, but simply articulates 
ideological nature of all historical writing, including her own. 
Having thus elucidated the affinity between Byatt’s novella and historiographic metafiction as a 
genre, I would like to point out another affinity which emerges out of the very narrative structure 
and technique of the story. Structurally, “$e Conjugal Angel” is devised as a series of uncanny 
visions and spiritualist séances, all of which are enacted through the textual exchange between 
the medium, attendees and the spirits of the dead in the form of automatic writing or chanting 
of poems and parts of the Bible. T exts, not people, seem to traverse unhindered between the two 
versions of reality, unaccompanied by their authors, only carelessly stitched to other invented 
texts, both fictional and non-fictional, pointing not to the extra-textual reality but seductively 
offering themselves as the only truly living, palpable matter. Remembering and mourning Hallam 
is for T ennyson an act of taming and rewriting “In Memoriam” which lets “the ghostly ancestors, 
Dante, $eocritus, Milton and the lost Keats, sing out again.” $eir “language was their afterlife. 
He saw it as a spinning circular cage in which he was a trapped bird, a cage like a globe, rimmed 
with the bright lines of the horizons of dawn and dusk. … $e world was a terrible lump of 
which his poem was a shining simulacrum.” Rethinking the laureate’s poem in a Donne-like way 
as “a heavy globe, spinning onwards in space, studded with everything there was, mountains 
and dust, tides and trees” (1992, 269), Byatt initiates a process of genuine textual appropriation 
and re-evaluation of the past through Sophy’s vision of T ennyson, which corresponds to acute 
historical consciousness and self-reflexivity inherent to historiographic metafiction. 
$is might also be considered as an act of “textual haunting” (2002, ix) by and within the novella 
itself, to borrow the phrase from Julian Wolfreys. As he says, the text is not necessarily haunted 

by its author or the historical moment of its production, but “the text itself … haunts and … is 
haunted by the traces which come together in this structure we call textual, which is phantomatic 
or phantasmatic in nature while, paradoxically, having an undeniably real or material effect, if 
not presence” (2002, xiii). Likewise, the participants of spiritualist rituals fervently welcome 
apparitions and stories of the departed in order to hear and see and feel that death and past 
exist only as specific meanings of life and present. It is in these aspects that séance becomes a 
metaphor for the writing and reading of historiographic metafiction because it incarnates the 
textual, emotional and ideological encounter of the past and the present. $e encounter is not 
merely nostalgic; quite the contrary, it generates a host of counter arguments and quotes which 
forever change our understanding/reading/writing of the present and past. 
 Byatt’s reading and writing of the Victorian past through spiritualist séances seems to be a 
delightful blend of the past and the present. One the one hand, her approach to the domain of 
the occult enables her to remain faithful to the postulates of the realist novel by accentuating 
numerous details which recreate the physical reality of the afterlife but also invoke recognizable 
offensive smells of the living. Furthermore, the novella ends with the unexpected return of Lilias’s 
husband from the dead whereby Byatt determinedly transfers us from the heavenly sphere to our 
own selves through a voluptuous evocation of the smells and touches of renewed life. Although 
such an ending offers the closure inherent to the realist novel, if only in a formal sense, the reader 
cannot but view this unexpected reversion to tradition as an attempt of the author to position 
her story at what might be termed a narrative threshold or limen. In doing so she allows it both 
to withdraw into the safety of tradition and surrender to the inviting openness of postmodernity, 
thus experimenting with what she terms “degrees of ‘realism’ or vision” (Byatt 1993, 167). 
Byatt’s exploration of séance as a metaphor of the textual and social unconscious concurs to 
a great extent with her eternal homage to T .S. Eliot and F .R. Leavis and her unwillingness to 
subscribe wholeheartedly among the supporters of postmodern literary theory. At the same 
time her “indecisiveness” leaves her enough space for an endless casual flirt with deconstruction, 
feminism and poststructuralism so that the reader is continuously impressed by her hidden 
skills of “theorizing.” $e reader is often intimidated by the gravity of her literary quest and an 
unspoken, though relentless, expectation to recognize all of the fine layers of her filigree-like 
metaphorical writing. However, even if he fails to trace back most of her textual references, he 
is bound to be rewarded with a renewed sense of faith which is carefully woven into the very 
fabric of her writing. As Michael Levenson claims in an article of evocative title, “$e Religion 
of Fiction,” Byatt constantly revisits the issue of belief in all her novels, though not as a religious 
missionary, but rather as a person who truly appreciates the necessity and beauty of believing.    
  … Her point is not to confirm religious truth, but to enlarge the religious sense, which 
locates value not in the infinite but in the yearning for the infinite, not in God but in 
the search for God. In a more clever analog, Byatt has drawn a connection between the 
“afterlife” of the Bible and the “afterlife” of the nineteenth century novel. We live in the 

shadow of both. But the task, as she sees it, is not to get out from under the shadow into the 
white modern light. It is to respect and to love our old shadowy needs, to keep faith with 
faith, and with realist fiction (1993). 
Levenson’s words touch upon the true essence of Byatt’s literary sensibility as they define her not as 
a Victorian nostalgist who chooses to stay forever in a darkened room for séances, but as an author 
who feels an organic connection between the Victorian age and late 20
th
 century. Respecting and 
loving our old shadowy needs is precisely what Byatt does by constantly invigorating séance as 
a key metaphor of our transition from “an undissociated paradise to our modern dissociated 
world” (Byatt 1993, 5). 
Further on, she recognizes all too well the sense of spiritual emptiness of the late nineteenth 
century in the “spiritual swamp” of the late twentieth century when “$e Conjugal Angel” is 
written. In a time when believing in any totalising story, however beautiful, is considered utterly 
old-fashioned, Byatt wants to bring to life images of Victorian reality when both body and soul 
are tortured with desire for moments of faith and inner peace. Byatt’s own organic connection 
with the Victorian past is nurtured through “a good and greedy reading” (Byatt 1993, 149) and 
it is this textual saturation or, should I say, textual craving that miraculously resurrects the past 
before the bedazzled reader. 
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