1. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 13. [BACK]

2. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson and Kathleen Tillotson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 5-6; 492. [BACK]

3. Maria DiBattista, in ''The Triumph of Clytemnestra: The Charades in Vanity Fair, '' PMLA 95 (1980), registers the orientalism of the charades as a strategic deflection from those issues central to the novel's tacit critique: "a universal, not a historically localized, cultural pathology: sexual bondage, enslavement, exploitation, and victimization" (829). In her exhaustive thematic treatment, DiBattista characterizes in passing the linguistic dimension of the scene's "'floating signifiers'" (828) that veil rather than reveal meaning, linking the "generic imperative" of the charades—"never to expose reality in the direct light of complete representation" (834)—with Thackeray's muted diagnosis of sexual subjection in the novel as a whole. [BACK]

4. Françoise Meltzer, Salomé and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 111. [BACK]

5. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Donald L. Lawler (New York: Norton, 1988), 3. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

6. Jane M. Gaines, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 43. [BACK]

7. "The Magnetic Daguerreotypes," Photographic Art-Journal 3, no. 6 (1862): 353-59, is retrieved and discussed in other terms by Alan Trachtenberg, "Mirror in the Marketplace: American Response to the Daguerreotype, 1839-1851," in The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration, ed. John Wood (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 60-73. Subsequent citations of the story are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

8. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (New York: Penguin, 1965), 35. [BACK]

9. Charles Reade, The Cloister and the Hearth (London: Collins, 1962), 193. [BACK]

10. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret, ed. David Skilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 295. [BACK]

11. H. Rider Haggard, Mr. Meeson's Will (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 135. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

12. Peter Brooks, in Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), characterizes the plight of an eponymous heroine from another nineteenth-century novella, Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais, with a formulation apt for Mr. Meeson's Will as well. A woman only threatened with a branding by a male that is never performed, and who, when dead, passes into memory as if she were merely "a book read during childhood," the duchess locates for Brooks what Haggard's heroine represents more blatantly: "a remarkable example of both the semiotization of the body and the somatization of story" (77). [BACK]

13. See my article "'Count Me In': Dracula, Hypnotic Participation, and the Late-Victorian Gothic of Reading," Lit 5 (1994): 1-18. [BACK]

14. See Joss Lutz Marsh, "In a Glass Darkly: Photography, the Pre-Modern, and Victorian Horror," in Prehistories of the Future, ed. Elazar Barker and Ronald Bush (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). [BACK]

15. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Penguin, 1979), 35. [BACK]

16. H. Rider Haggard, She, ed. Daniel Karlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 216. [BACK]

17. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, ed. Jenni Calder (London: Penguin, 1979), 50. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

18. George du Maurier, Trilby (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894), 418. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

19. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1988), 74. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. Both the manuscript and magazine version of the text, before Conrad's later revisions, give an overexplicit account of this picture: ". . . sunlight can be made to lie too, yet that face on paper seemed to be a reflection of truth itself . One felt that no manipulation of light and pose could have conveyed the delicate shade of truthfulness upon those features. She looked out trustfully " (Kimbrough, notes, 74; emphasis added to phrases later excised). One readily suspects why the last adverb "trustfully" must have seemed too precise and narrow for the amorphous aura of credence/credulity meant to be evoked. One likes to think, too, that the previous deletion removes any confusion between the Intended as we have her on Conrad's ''paper" and the reductive impress(ion) of the photograph. [BACK]

20. J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 67. [BACK]

21. Georges Poulet, "Phenomenology of Reading," New Literary History 1 (October 1969): 53-68. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]