As prominent figures in the fin-de-siècle literatures of France and England respectively, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly and Vernon Lee were two among many decadent authors who took an interest in the tension between interiority and exteriority. This predilection was strikingly illustrated by John William Waterhouse in his 1896 painting Pandora, which represents a lovely woman cracking open the mythical chest that will unleash all evils unto humanity. Inside a forest grove, the gold of the chest and whiteness of Pandora’s skin stand out sharply against the dark blue and green woods of the background; however, this contrast is counterbalanced by a Baudelairian play of tonal correspondences in which the blue of Pandora’s dress harmonises with the stream behind her, the glimpses of sky between the trees, and mysterious shimmering wisps inside the chest. 

These correspondences betray a paradox: what belongs to the subject (Pandora’s dress) is refracted in the objective (the stream); what is outside (the blue sky) is also inside (the blue wisps). Waterhouse’s painting thereby depicts the box as a paradoxical site of negotiation between interiority and exteriority. The symbolism of the box as paradox has been alluded to by scholar Geneviève Sicotte in her analysis of “objets doubles” [double objects] as a recurrent motif in decadent fiction: these beautiful containers embody a  “dichotomie entre l’intérieur et l’extérieur” [dichotomy between the interior and the exterior], insofar as they often hide something morbid or repulsive (Sicotte 142). Building on Sicotte’s remarks, I argue that the box as an object highlights the paradox between interiority and exteriority ­­– or form and conteJohnnt – that lies at the very heart of decadent fiction: boxes reflect how decadence ambivalently seems to prioritise pure literary form over content while also suggesting that “l’apparence pure n’existe pas… la surface dissimule toujours quelque chose” [pure appearance does not exist… the surface always conceals something] (Sicotte 144). This paper will explore these negotiations through the significance of boxes in two characteristically decadent short stories, Barbey d’Aurevilly’s “A un dîner d’athées” (1874) and Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst” (1888).

Although many critics have looked at Barbey and Lee’s respective relations to decadence, a comparative study of the two has yet to be seen. This gap may be due to the apparent distance, both geographical and historical, that separates them. Born in 1808, Barbey was a French royalist and Catholic writer who largely owed his fame to the admiration of “la jeunesse symboliste et décadente” [the symbolist and decadent youth] at the end of the century (Bertrand 181). Despite his disdain for the materialism of many decadents, Barbey has been credited as their precursor since the earliest scholarly study of the movement (Bertrand 163-64). In The Romantic Agony, Mario Praz described him as “the connecting link between two generations, the “‘frénétique’ of 1830 and the ‘decadent’ of 1880” (311). Les Diaboliques, the collection containing “A un dîner d’athées”, was published in 1874: though the germ of decadence had been planted by Théophile Gautier’s preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal (1857), it had not yet been fleshed out by Paul Bourget’s seminal essays (1883) or by Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884), the “canonical novel” of the movement (Coste 122). 

In contrast, Vernon Lee’s Hauntings (1888), featuring “Oke of Okehurst”, was published at a time when decadence had already spread across the channel and become a more or less crystallised phenomenon. Though critics have framed “dominant expressions of British decadence” as mostly “imitations of the Parisian avant-garde” (Murray 155), Lee does not have a straightforward relationship with the heritage of French decadence. As a British author born in the latter half of the nineteenth century, she notably deviated from the credo of “art for art’s sake,” criticising its “amoral and sterile cult of sensation” and denouncing the ethical pitfalls of “excessive aestheticism” (Evangelista 7). Her literary career spanned the transition from fin-de-siècle decadence to interwar modernism. Through their distinct historical vantage points, Barbey and Lee can be seen as metaphorical bookends for decadence, essentially framing it in a parallactic framework that promises to offer unique perspectives on the movement. 

Aside from these differences, “A un dîner d’athées” and “Oke of Okehurst” reveal one salient similarity between the two authors: a shared predilection for typically decadent themes like the supernatural, the historical past “overcoming the banality of bourgeois modernity” (Murray 171), and sexual or moral perversity. In Barbey’s “A un dîner d’athées,” a former Napoleonian soldier regales his dinner guests with the story of his affair with his superior’s enigmatic mistress; when the woman’s infidelity is revealed, tensions between the couple culminate in a violent altercation that weaponizes a crystal urn containing the embalmed heart of an infant.

Lee herself was no stranger to such gory, macabre scenes: her short story “A Wedding Chest” (1904), for instance, features the corpse of a young bride stuffed inside an intricately painted cassone and sent to her fiancé as a cruel gift. But it is perhaps her “Oke of Okehurst” that presents the most parallels with Barbey’s work: the tale follows an artist who penetrates into the reclusive manor of an English squire and his wife in order to paint their portraits; there, he becomes witness to the woman’s morbid fascination with her seventeenth-century ancestress’ lover and to her husband’s progressive descent into a jealous madness, which eventually leads him to murder her.

At their crux, Barbey and Lee’s stories are both narratives centred around a box. The shattering of the crystal urn that enshrines the infant’s heart is the catalyst for the entire story of “A un dîner d’athées:” after Mesnilgrand discretely hands off the child’s remains to a priest for safekeeping, he runs into a friend who demands to know what the famously nonbelieving soldier was doing inside a church. In Lee’s story, the point of no return in the psychological war between Alice and William Oke coincides with the opening of an oaken press containing the clothes of their ancestors during a party; the resulting masquerade of guests seems to give a solid shape to the ghosts that haunt the couple, which functions as the final nail in the coffin of William’s sanity. 

This paper will begin by examining Barbey and Lee’s use of boxes as narrative structuring tools that draw attention to the form and materiality of their texts as objects themselves. I will then delve into the boxes’ relations to the historical topics of the stories, which will ultimately allow us to explore the authors’ distinct conceptions of subjectivity and of the relationship between the self and the other. 

1. I. Inside Out: The Box as Structural Paradox

The first section of my paper will focus on the significance of boxes in relation to the form of Barbey and Lee’s short stories. I will begin by examining the role of the box as the narrative structure of “A un dîner d’athées” and “Oke of Okehurst”, before demonstrating how Barbey and Lee’s boxes complicate the relationship between interiority and exteriority. By starting with an exploration of the stories’ form (or the “outside” of the box) before moving onto an analysis of their content, I aim not to replicate the distinction between the exterior and the interior, but rather to highlight its inherent fluidity.

A cursory reading of “A un dîner d’athées” and “Oke of Okehurst” is enough to reveal their authors’ love for descriptions of ornate things, which Sicotte defines as one of the most frequent motifs of decadent fiction (139). Barbey’s attention to such fashionable details as the protagonist’s “foulard blanc, de nuance écrue semé d’imperceptibles étoiles d’or brodées à la main” [white kerchief with ecru accents, speckled with imperceptible, hand-embroidered gold stars] (202), as well as Lee’s depiction of the Oke manor’s “beautifully damascened suits of court armour” and tapestries “of sixteenth-century Persian make” (Hauntings 118) clearly illustrate a typically decadent “virulent form of attachment to things” (Apter 14). The settings of both stories illustrate how the fin-de-siècle transformation of the interior into “a museum in which curios, antiques, and personal memorabilia were lovingly displayed” (Apter 7) results in a dizzying accumulation of luxurious details which begs to be organised and contained in some way; it implicitly calls for a box. 

In contrast to these painstakingly detailed trinkets, the central boxes of “A un dîner d’athées” and “Oke of Okehurst” are described in almost shockingly succinct terms: the first explicit mention of the reliquary of Rosalba’s child simply calls it an “urne de cristal” [crystal urn], mere moments before it shatters (Barbey 238), and the Okes’ chest of clothes is referred to only as “a certain carved oaken press” (Lee, Hauntings 150). The containers seem to fade behind the importance of their contents, whether it be the embalmed heart of a child or “a perfect museum of costumes […] a thing to take away the breath of a bric-à-brac collector, an antiquary, or a genre painter” (Lee, Hauntings 150).

The only possible hint at the significance of the urn and the press is the fact that their appearance seems foreshadowed by a multitude of similar boxes. Barbey’s urn is prefigured first by the church’s confession box that ultimately becomes the heart’s final resting place (186), then by the box of communion wafers that Joséphine Tesson hides in her bosom (208). As for “Okehurst,” the arrival of the oaken press is preceded by the presence of “big wedding coffers” (Lee, Hauntings 118) in the hallway of the manor and of a mysteriously nondescript “carved wedding-chest” in the yellow room (Lee, Hauntings 145). This abundance of containers also anticipates the Italian cassone of “A Wedding Chest” – yet another one of Lee’s intricately described boxes that contrasts with the conspicuous nakedness of the oaken press.

The seeming lack of ornamental value in the boxes of “A un dîner d’athées” and “Oke of Okehurst” implicitly suggests that their true purpose within the text is not decorative, but structural. In other words, these easily overshadowed yet highly symbolic objects are narrative scaffolding tools: there is little need to describe what the urn and the press look like, since the stories are taking place inside of them. Scholars like Florence Goyet have hinted at the short story being a type of literary box, remarkable for its “stifling” nature and “restrictive structural “laws” (7). In his analysis of “the common origins of the short story and decadence,” Kostas Boyiopoulos goes even further by asserting that this box is characteristic of fin-de-siècle literature, insofar as it represents “a paradoxical imperative in which morbid excess is delimited, captured, and controlled as quintessence” (303). As a box, the short story form provides a “delimiting contour” (Boyiopoulos 305) to contain and display Barbey and Lee’s extravagant tales of debauchery, madness, and murder. 

Furthermore, this box is not singular, but multiple; it “creates microstructures […] at all levels of the text”, including the paratextual one (Goyet 35). The publication of “A un dîner d’athées” and “Oke of Okehurst” within larger collections of texts further encourages us to view them as boxes within boxes. Barbey’s preface to his Diaboliques contextualises them within a “petit Musée” [little Museum] of she-devils, which is itself part of a larger, unfinished collection of twelve stories (4). Each story thus becomes a medallion inside a “collection de talismans” [collection of talismans] (Humphreys 268), each she-devil a portrait enclosed inside a locket. Lee similarly highlights the materiality of her text by comparing the interest of readers in her “four little tales” (Hauntings xi) to a desire for “a pocket-superstition […] to carry around in gold and enamel” (Hauntings viii). Like Barbey’s Diaboliques, each of her stories revolves around an enigmatic heroine; moreover, Lee’s collection sees this heroine grow progressively more mysterious and abstract from story to story, beginning as a prototypical femme fatale in Amour Dure to end as an androgynous, ghostly castrato in A Wicked Voice. The resulting effect is less that of examining a gallery of portraits than that of opening a series of increasingly smaller and more inscrutable Russian dolls. Among these, “Oke of Okehurst” is further contained by Lee’s dedication of the story to her friend, Count Boutourline: “The sight of this little book will serve at least to remind you […] that there is such a season as winter, such a place as Florence, and such a person as your friend” (Hauntings 108). The anaphoric syntax of this sentence once again reminds one of a series of nested boxes, which further presents the short story as something to be “unpacked and unraveled, inwardly amplified” (Boyiopoulos 304). It also foreshadows the storytelling mechanism used by both Barbey and Lee: Mesnilgrand’s story, which he recounts to a roomful of atheistic bon vivants secluded like a military outpost within a prim and proper town (Barbey 197), is embedded within the larger tale of an unknown narrator; in “Oke of Okehurst,” the narrator reports the tragedy of the Okes to a silent auditor from inside his studio, which will thus become a metaphorical frame for our mental picture of the Okehurst manor (Hauntings 111). 

Another manifestation of the box motif can be seen in Barbey and Lee’s focus on the distinction between interior and exterior spaces. The two stories take place predominantly within indoor settings defined by their separation from the outside world: for instance, the church in the beginning of “A un dîner d’athées” imitates both the intimacy of a romantic meeting and the subterranean whispers of a “fourmilière d’âmes” [anthill of souls] (Barbey 182-83); a similar ascetic enclosure surrounds the austere atheist Mesnilgrand, who lives within “les limites de son jardin et de sa cour” [the confines of his garden and his yard] with servants who “s’entretenaient à voix basse, comme dans une église” [spoke in hushed voices, as if inside a church] (Barbey 196). Similarly, “Oke of Okehurst” is set inside the isolated Oke manor, “a good mile and a half” away from the rest of civilisation (Lee, Hauntings 116).

According to Goyet, all short stories rely on a “structuring antithesis” to generate narrative tension; in Barbey and Lee’s tales, this antithesis is precisely the inside/outside divide (28). The resulting tension manifests itself as a pervasive sense of claustrophobia: old Mesnilgrand’s dining room is compared to a bottle whose cork is about to pop (Barbey 203); the “panelled and carved” walls of the Oke manor, “hung round with portraits,” seem to close in on us (Hauntings 116), filling the text with a “heady and oppressive” atmosphere as if the house were fit to burst with the ghosts of ancestral Okes (Hauntings 148). 

In spite or perhaps because of how much tension it generates, the boundary that separates interiority and exteriority is far from impermeable: Barbey and Lee’s stories are both told by an outsider who travels across this boundary, through a voyeuristic narration that highlights the reliance of decadent fiction on “the fetishistic conceit of ‘showing and telling’ what was in principle […] sealed behind closed doors” (Apter 9). The banquet of “A un dîner d’athées” is described by an unknown narrator who is not part of the dinner guests but speaks to us long after they are already dead (Barbey 199). Even Mesnilgrand, the embedded narrator of the story, is momentarily reduced to a “master-voyeur” (Apter 9) when he overhears major Ydow and Rosalba from inside her closet (Barbey 235).

As a painter, the narrator of “Oke of Okehurst” has a literal duty to watch and observe the Oke couple. Yet despite being, for all intents and purposes, a professional voyeur, he seems to participate more actively in events than Mesnilgrand; by goading Alice into talking and prompting William to open the press, he sets the drama of the Okes into motion (Lee, Hauntings 169). In contrast, Mesnilgrand is almost a passive observer. Like an anticlimactic deus ex machina, he only springs into action after the urn is already broken and Rosalba has been severely mutilated by her jealous lover (Barbey 240). His voyeuristic passivity thus simultaneously crosses yet reasserts the boundary between interiority and exteriority: more of a narrator than an actor, Mesnilgrand remains on the margins for most of his story, overseeing it from the outside. 

In both texts, voyeuristic narrators set out to uncover a secret: what was the purpose of Mesnilgrand’s visit to the church? What happened to the Okes? Barbey and Lee’s stories are built on a “structure de déshabillage” [structure of undressing] that teasingly and progressively reveals what was hidden (Frémiot 106). However, destabilising changes in point of view suggest that the voyeur’s knowledge remains incomplete: we never get to the bottom of the box. Barbey’s narrator goes from a seemingly omniscient view of the church and town to an outsider’s perspective on the main character: the identity of “l’homme entré dans la chappelle” [the man who came into the chapel] remains unknown to us until his name is revealed by another character (185). Only then, as if Mesnilgrand’s interiority had been unlocked, does the narrator dive into an in-depth study of his character – but not without reminders that he is speaking from a different temporal context, as part of a “nous qui sommes venus après ces gens-là” [we who came after these people] (Barbey 199). Boxes seem to be opening and closing in front of us at a dizzying pace.

Lee conveys a more subtle yet similar vertigo through her narrator’s point of view: the painter begins his story from a quasi-omniscient position, positing that Alice would have approved of the circumstances of her own death “could she have known” (Hauntings 111). Soon enough, though, cracks appear in this perspective: “how should I know that the wretched husband should take matters so seriously?” he asks, in a rhetorical question that receives no answer from his silent auditor and only serves to heighten our curiosity (Lee, Hauntings 173). In “A un dîner d’athées” and “Oke of Okehurst,” the narrator – and by extension, the reader – is never sure of being inside or outside the box. 

The paradoxical nature of the tension between interiority and exteriority is further highlighted by the stories’ lack of resolution. Critics of the short story form have often stressed the importance of its ending, with Edgar Allan Poe going as far as to claim that “the whole short story is a kind of preparation for its ending” (Goyet 44). Goyet’s argument that the ending “brings to the surface the tension that organises the text” and “gives the reader a key to this narrative” (46) implies that the short story should end with a sense of closure, “like a box snapping shut” (McGuinness). In the case of “A un dîner d’athées,” Mesnilgrand’s tale is received by “un silence plus expressif que toutes les réflexions” [a silence more expressive than any words] which “pesait sur la bouche” [weighed on the mouths] of all the guests, effectively sealing them shut (Barbey 242). The story seems even more neatly wrapped up by a didactic aparté about the Church, as one might expect to find in a Christian’s cautionary tale: “comprenaient-ils enfin, ces athées, que, quand l’Eglise n’aurait été instituée que pour recueillir les cœurs […] dont on ne sait plus que faire, c’eût été assez beau comme cela !” [did all these atheists finally understand that, had the Church been instituted only to receive the hearts that have nowhere else to go, that would have been more than enough? ] (Barbey242). The host’s injunction to serve the after-dinner coffee signifies that the banquet has officially come to a close (Barbey 242). The ending of “Oke of Okehurst” conveys a similar sense of closure, as expressed by the narrator’s blunt statement: “that is the end of the story” (Lee, Hauntings 191). The deaths of Alice and William fulfil their ancestor’s prophecy foretelling the end of the Oke dynasty. The final description of the manor’s “vaulted hall, hung round with ancestral pictures” and “filled-up moat, where stood the big blasted oak” (Lee, Hauntings 190) perfectly echoes the narrator’s first introduction to the house: the story has come full circle. 

Nonetheless, this sense of closure does little to answer the reader’s lingering questions about Rosalba, her child, or the ghost of the Oke manor. Like most decadent stories, “A un dîner d’athées” and “Oke of Okehurst” end in “irresolution and futility” (Boyiopoulos 303). The uncertainty around Rosalba’s fate reveals that “the unexpected endings of Barbey’s Diaboliques do not solve the stories’ mysteries”; rather, “they mimick the structure of a closed story yet remain open” (Rossbach 285). According to Goyet, this “uneasiness” is especially characteristic of “fantastic stories,” which tend to “superimpose two interpretations without withdrawing one or the other” (49). The metaphorical closure at the end of “Oke of Okehurst” is destabilised by the description of William literally “unlocking the door” and rushing “out of the house with dreadful cries” (Lee, Hauntings 191). In “A un dîner dathées,” the frustrated curiosity of the guests (and the readers) regarding Rosalba is at least somewhat subsumed into an awed fascination for Mesnilgrand. The story forgets its heroine to reframe itself as a tale about the spiritual redemption of its narrator; the broken urn has been sublimated into a confession box. On the other hand, Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst” offers no such comfort. The painter and his auditor seem to vanish along with the Okes: the story and its frame are swallowed up into the gaping maw of the oaken press. Far from providing a key to the narrative, the locket containing Lovelock’s hair only adds another turn in the proverbial lock of the Okehurst enigma. This lack of answers forces us to read closure not as resolution, but as inscrutability. 

• II. Outside In: Unboxing History and Encountering the Other

Up to this point, my analysis of “A un dîner d’athées” and “Oke of Okehurst” has focused on their narrative structures, which simultaneously contrast and superimpose exteriority and interiority in a way that replicates a series of nested boxes or “cercles concentriques” [concentric circles] (Frémiot 106). This confusion highlights a similar connection between the historical context in which these stories were written – “le plus large et le moins secret de ces cercles” [the widest and least secret of these circles] – and the historical subject matter at the heart of them – “la petite histoire de l’Histoire” [the little story of History] (Frémiot 106). 

The significance of history as frame and subject of Barbey and Lee’s stories is clearly illustrated by the funereal nature of Rosalba’s urn and the Okes’ press: either literally or figurately, both boxes are containers of the dead. The historical past is arguably the most salient leitmotif in Barbey’s oeuvre: many of his stories, including “A un dîner d’athées”, are retrospective narratives of the French Revolution or Empire told during the Restoration (Laroche 60). A staunch defender of the aristocracy, Barbey was particularly tortured by the loss of Ancien Régime values and the ensuing collapse of longstanding social hierarchies in nineteenth-century France.  His comparison of Mesnilgrand to a frameless portrait echoes his anguished description of himself in his private writings: “portrait dépaysé, je cherche mon cadre” [I am a lost portrait seeking my frame] (Dherbey 583). In contrast, Lee’s fascination with the past seems to have been motivated more by an enthusiastic intellectual curiosity than by any personal identity crisis; though scholars like Sophie Geoffroy and Sally Blackburn-Daniels have cleverly connected the themes of “Oke of Okehurst” to Lee’s ambivalent feelings towards her own ancestry, these autobiographical echoes remain less explicit and emotionally charged than Barbey’s identification with Mesnilgrand.

Barbey and Lee’s distinct stances towards history may be explained by the different political climates of France and Great Britain in the nineteenth century. Unlike Lee, Barbey wrote about a tumultuous past that mostly coincided with his lived experience: born in 1808, he personally witnessed the successive collapses of the Empire, the monarchy, and the Republic. The historical entrapment of Mesnilgrand’s guests, who are described as caught “dans les rainures” [in the grooves] of their time (Barbey 200), resulted from the immense sociopolitical transformation of post-1789 France: with the establishment of a government by the people and the evolution of the private individual into a public citizen, “le pouvoir central s’infiltre […] dans la sphère privée” [centralised power infiltrates the private sphere] and “l’intérieur devient l’extérieur” [the inside becomes the outside] (Frémiot 103-04). The breaking of the urn represents the primordial “fracture révolutionnaire” [revolutionary fracture] (Laroche 60) at the centre of Barbey’s oeuvre, which, like Pandora’s box, opened to unleash the scourges of democracy, the bourgeoisie, and materialism unto French society; it is no accident that the embalmed heart inside evokes Musset’s memorably bleak description of the French fin de siècle as a “spectre moitié momie et moitié fœtus” [a half-mummy, half-foetus spectre] (La Confession d’un enfant du siècle 8). 

The lack of such a dramatic break in Lee’s text is likely due to the relative peace that existed at the same time across the channel. In contrast to France, the British fin de siècle was marked by the long reign of Queen Victoria, the rise of imperialism, and a subsequent period of internal tranquillity and prosperity within the heart of Empire (all of which were made possible by the violent subjugation and exploitation of colonised countries). William Oke personifies an easier incorporation of the gentry into the rising middle class: under an appearance of bourgeois mediocrity, he still fulfils the role of a knight, “defending the weak and admonishing the ill-conducted” of Okehurst (Lee, Hauntings 139).

The distinction between Barbey and Lee’s heroes is part of a larger difference between nineteenth-century French and British fiction: while the former often depicts irreconcilable situations resulting in “tragic conflict”, the latter tends to privilege “accommodation” (Cohen 496). Lee’s comparison of the Oke manor to “the palace of the Sleeping Beauty” (Hauntings 118) contrasts with Barbey’s “salle à manger hurlante” [roaring dining room] (199). However, this discreteness does not diminish the power of history: the oft-mentioned oak wood of the press ominously evokes the surrounding trees of the “savage, haunting” countryside, where Lee finds “traces of premodern life” that resist “English industrial modernity” (Murray 157). The sprawling masquerade of the Okes’ guests reflects the way in which the press threatens to creak open and spread its contents outside; the fact that it never breaks suggests that Pandora’s box remains closed and intact only to open again another day. 

Far from being dead and buried, the historical past in Barbey and Lee’s works is more aptly understood as “a living remnant” that “eludes, and eventually overcomes the rationalizing, scientific mind” (Murray 160). This idea of the past as an uncanny, phantom-like presence is further fleshed out by the highly gothic overtones of the titles that they gave to their collections. Any apparent ties to the gothic genre, however, are destabilised by Lee’s disavowal of ghosts in her preface to Hauntings and by the fact that Barbey’s heroines evoke moral instead of metaphysical horror. The two authors may flirt with gothic tropes, but their spectres never become explicitly supernatural. For them, ghosts are a way to revive the past without restoring it, to conjure it in order to “le rappeler comme passé” [remind it to us as past] (Laroche 67). This positive absence of the supernatural is precisely the source of its power: Barbey has been praised by critics for the subtlety of his “magie proprement aurevillienne” [characteristically aurevillian magic], which contrasts with the more heavy-handed gothic of Mathurin or Radcliffe (Dherbey 576). Similarly, Lee’s preface to Hauntings asserts that the most impactful kind of supernatural in literature manifests itself as a “vague we know not what […] enwrapped in mystery” (vii). In order to be pervasive, it must be understated to the point of being ethereal.  

This insubstantial essence is nevertheless connected to highly sensuous imagery: the immaterial has a material shape. Lee’s association of ghosts with “strange confused heaps” that emit a “penetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady” smell reminds one of the costumes inside the Okes’ press (Hauntings ix-x). In “Oke of Okehurst” and in “A un dîner d’athées,” the supernatural past attaches itself to tangible objects that carry it into the “real” present: 

“Les durées n’intersectent donc pas pour se confondre, mais pour marquer durement leur incompatibilité ; elles vont même parfois jusqu’à exploser l’une dans l’autre, et le rôle de détonateur est souvent dévolu chez Barbey à un objet, porteur de passé, qu’il introduit en force dans le présent” [Therefore, timeframes do not become conflated through their intersection, but rather insist on their incompatibility; they can even go as far as to explode into one another, and Barbey usually gives the role of detonator to an object infused with the past and forcibly brought into the present] (Dherbey 579). 

The explosions of the urn and press collapse history into reality, thus revealing the uneasy cohabitation between past and present which is at the root of every haunting. Despite belonging to the past, Barbey and Lee’s boxes are imbued with a “terrible consistence qui pulvérise les frêles constructions de l’actuel” [terrible tangibility that pulverises the fragile constructions of reality] (Dherbey 577). The shattering of the urn foreshadows the destruction of Mesnilgrand’s regiment and the downfall of Napoleon’s army (Barbey 241); the contents of the press transform the “well-bred English men and women” of the Okes’ party into “noisy wretches” and give a shape to the ghost of Lovelock in the narrator’s mind (Lee, Hauntings 165-66). Instead of existing in separate boxes, the past and present are superimposed onto one another, enclosing Barbey and Lee’s characters in overlapping yet contradictory frames of reference. 

One finds a similar tension in Barbey and Lee’s gender dynamics: as objects shared between couples, the boxes in “A un dîner d’athées” and “Oke of Okehurst” initially seem to be signifiers of the domestic interior, bringing together husband and wife in the closed embrace of matrimonial unity. However, Rosalba eventually reveals that the child inside the urn does not actually belong to Ydow; and although the wooden press contains the clothes of both William and Alice’s ancestors, it evokes diametrically opposite emotional reactions from each of them. Instead of uniting men and women, Barbey and Lee’s boxes seem to replicate the Victorian ideal of separate spheres for men and women. The all-male banquet in “A un dîner d’athées” contrasts with the predominantly female salons of “Le plus bel amour de Don Juan” and “Le dessous des cartes d’une partie de whist;” William Oke spends his days in his study (Lee, Hauntings 116) while Alice lounges in the yellow room, where her husband “never will stay a minute alone” (Lee, Hauntings 142). 

Boxed into their own elusive sphere, women become inscrutable, inaccessible, and therefore irresistible to men. Just as Barbey’s heroines derive their seductive power from their “enigmatic nature” (Rossbach 281), Alice attracts the narrator’s curiosity by being “the most marvellously […] baffling subject for a portrait” (Lee, Hauntings 126-27). This erotic yet exasperating female impenetrability is met with varying degrees of sadism: Barbey’s repeated metaphor of the peach frames sexual possession as a way to force open the woman-box and internalise her by biting into her “à belles dents” [with all their teeth] (228). In addition to being a symbolic rape, Ydow’s mutilation of Rosalba has paradoxical implications: he simultaneously “opens” her by forcing the handle of his sword into her genitalia and “seals” her shut with wax like a letter, reducing her to a closed, hermetic (w)hole. Though Alice Oke fascinates the men around her for mostly psychological rather than overtly sexual reasons, this fascination is still framed as a type of violence. The painter’s simultaneous obsession with and dismissal of her character exemplify Lee’s use of “objectified femininity to signify wrong ways of looking” (Mahoney 53), insofar as he admires her beauty while openly disdaining her “theatrical over-energy” (Lee, Hauntings 185). Meanwhile, William’s treatment of Alice reflects Lee’s belief that traditional Victorian empathy is “inherently dangerous” (Fluhr 287); his tenderness conceals a need for “mastery, dominance, and control” (Mahoney 43) that ultimately forces open her interiority by literally putting a hole in her (Lee, Hauntings 191).

Against these attempts to open, decipher and appropriate them, Barbey and Lee’s heroines paradoxically use their objectification as a shield. Rosalba’s blushing makes her legible to men, but only erotically; like the crystal urn, her body encloses a heart that is made no less inscrutable by the transparency of its vessel. Similarly, the painter’s admission that Alice’s strangeness is “as difficult to define as the peculiarity of her outward appearance, and perhaps very closely connected therewith” (Lee, Hauntings 127) suggests that her objectified, inscrutable surface protects her interiority from his judgmental eye. This idea complements Lee’s rejection of “the subjectivism of Paterian spectatorship” and her focus on objects’ “capacity to shock and destabilise, to return the gaze” of the observer (Mahoney 50-52). Petrified into a “statue de corail vivant” [living coral statue]. Rosalba defiantly asserts her autonomy as a subject by redirecting objectification towards her male lovers: “Je les ai eus tous… mais ils ne m’ont pas eue, eux !” [I have had them all, but they didn’t have me!] (Barbey 238). Likewise, the more William tries to solve the “dreadful mystery” of his wife (Lee, Hauntings 174), the more she taunts and psychologically tortures him until he is reduced to “a marionette qu’elle allait casser” [a puppet that she was about to break] (Barbey 235). Enigmatic to the end, shot dead in the dress of her ancestress, Alice seems content to join the relics buried inside the press and drag her husband in with her: the wooden box shuts like a coffin on the Oke dynasty. 

Throughout their stories, Barbey and Lee use the historical past, the supernatural, and objectified women as examples of encounters with alterity. The way their characters react to the Other indirectly informs us about the authors’ different conceptions of the self as subject: while Barbey objectifies his heroes to make them stand out, Lee objectifies hers to emphasise their interconnectedness with the outside world. The crystal urn of “A un dîner d’athées” evokes Barbey’s lifelong obsession with gems, which scholars have often read as a metaphor for “the singularity and uniqueness” of “genius” (Humphreys 260). This lapidary imagery gives an object-like impassibility to his characters, who seem “cut and chiseled out of stone” (Humphreys 261). Mesnilgrand listens to his guests with “l’indifférence du bronze” [bronze-like indifference] (Barbey 211) and a noble self-restraint that likens him to his “camée antique […] représentant la tête d’Alexandre” [antique cameo of the head of Alexander] (Barbey 203). His distinctness from the other boisterous revellers positions the non-ego as a foil to the self, allowing Barbey’s heroes to “hone their edges on the characters around them” (Humphreys 265). In Lee’s words, this antagonistic relationship is an inevitable by-product of the ego’s attempts to survive as a discrete entity:

Given that the individual – what we call the soul – has come to exist as a part of the universe, this microcosm must, under penalty of destruction, perpetually seek to […] affirm its existence as opposed to the macrocosm (Lee, Beauty and Ugliness 344-46).

The need to oppose oneself to the world explains why Mesnilgrand is more a narrator than an actor: the aloof storyteller stands out by subjugating others through narration, towering over them from an “unusually detailed and elaborate” frame which threatens “to overshadow the story that is told” (Rossbach 277). 

The virile self-reliance of the aurevillian subject is nevertheless undermined by a painful inner duplicity, which can be seen in the contrast between Mesnilgrand’s passionate bouts of eloquence and his cold, indifferent silences (Barbey 203). The combination of affected nonchalance and an anguished soul can be understood both as a “superposition des deux personnages en un seul” [superimposition of two characters in one] and a “séparation d’avec soi-même” [separation from oneself] (Dherbey 583-85), which creates “un vide intérieur incurable” [incurable inner void] (Frémiot 113). In his personal life, Barbey resolved this “scission” by converting to Catholicism, using God as a third party to achieve a “dépassement de la dualité” [sublimation of duality] (Dherbey 585-86). His conception of God as the only other to be admitted within the temple of the self explains his disdain for younger, atheistic decadents, whom he accused of replacing the soul of poetry with “le caillou d’un camée” [the stone of a cameo] (Bertrand 165). 

For her part, Lee unreservedly discouraged the subject’s impulse towards radical differentiation. Upon reading Theodor Lipps’ influential description of empathy as “an ego which enters into the non-ego”, she criticised his “metaphysical” belief in “the unity of an ego” (Lee, Beauty and Ugliness 54-56) and its existence as “an immaterial entity” (Lee, Beauty and Ugliness 60). The press’ capacity to hold an abundance of “garments of men and women long dead and buried” (Hauntings 165) illustrates Lee’s perception of the self as a “network of past and present ancestral selves” (Vrettos 205), which shatters the “notion of a unified or singular subjectivity” (Fluhr 287). Lee redirected our focus to the material object instead: as an agnostic preoccupied first and foremost with “the physics rather than the metaphysics of being,” she confirmed the idea that “Victorian aestheticism is essentially a materialistic creed” (Leighton 2). Her predilection for things that can be touched is conveyed through Alice’s “reverent” handling of Lovelock’s poems (Lee, Hauntings 145) and her embodiment of her ancestress through the latter’s seventeenth-century dress. 

According to Lee, engaging with the other as “something truly […] separate from the self” led to a “merging” of the subject with the object (Mahoney 46); Alice’s interaction with relics triggers bodily reactions that seem to further transform her into a reincarnation of her ancestress (Lee, Hauntings 146). Aside from its aesthetic effects, this “conflation of human subjects and material objects” (Vrettos 207) allows Lee to imagine “ethical interactions that are not based in domination” (Mahoney 41). Frustrated with the “subjectivism” of Pater’s aestheticism (Mahoney 50) and its moral “disinterestedness” (Lee, Beauty and Ugliness 177), she developed a system of ethics that emphasised the equality and interconnectedness of ego and non-ego. The narrative framing of “Okehurst” deliberately fails to distance the painter from the Okes, as the narrator becomes enmeshed with the characters he observes to the point of disappearing with them at the end of the story. The fact that “understanding another means losing oneself” seems to be an inevitable by-product of the ego’s permeability (Fluhr 288). Lee and Barbey’s conceptions of the subject thus function as mirror images of each other: while one reflects the Romantic heritage of decadence through its “Byronic egotism” (Gettmann 51), the other seems to anticipate modernist deconstructions of the subject. 

Situated at opposite ends of the decadent movement, Barbey and Lee both build their stories through the structural and thematic framework of the box, displaying a similar fascination with history and processes of objectification only to disagree radically on the nature of the subject. Barbey’s belief in the soul evokes a set of Russian dolls that eventually reveals a solid core: the object inside the inanimate crystal urn turns out to be the ultimate representation of subjectivity – a human heart. On the other hand, Lee’s press of costumes symbolises her faithfulness to boxes all the way down; containers themselves, instead of an elusive, immaterial content; tatters that once clothed the dead, peopled with no ghosts other than “spurious” ones (Hauntings xi). 

But for neither of them – nor for Pandora – is the box empty: after all evils have been unleashed, hope remains inside. In their respective ways, Barbey and Lee were dissatisfied with the decadent movement’s prioritisation of form over content and its sterile detachment from ethics. The notion of art as a pure, empty form is inherently paradoxical, since form always implies content: no matter how enchanting a box looks, its primary effect is to draw attention to its interiority. Barbey’s turn to Catholicism as a means to solve this paradox and reinfuse art with moral values foreshadowed the conversion of many decadents, such as Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans (Coste 123). Staying within the materialist framework of aestheticism, Lee instead carved out an object-oriented ethos that dissolved boundaries between interiority and exteriority, self and other: turning itself inside out like an unfathomable box, the ego welcomes strangeness as a stranger. 

The arguments I have outlined in this paper should in no way be construed as exhaustive. A lot remains to be said about boxes and decadent fiction’s obsession with language as form – a beautiful container whose content may be irrelevant, or which might not contain anything at all. Such issues merit to be explored in more depth than the scope of this paper allows; its aim is only to gesture towards a hitherto unexplored frame of analysis. There is always, somewhere in the dark, a box beckoning to be opened.

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