The Grotto as Neo-Victorian Heterotopia: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012)

ES REVIEW. SPANISH JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 45 (2024): 11–30 E-ISSN 2531-1654 The Grotto as Neo-Victorian Heterotopia: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012) La cueva como heterotopía neo-victoriana: The Realm of Shells (2006) de Sonia Overall y Elijah’s Mermaid (2012) de Essie Fox LAURA MONRÓS-GASPAR Institution address: Universitat de València. Avda. Blasco Ibáñez, 32, 46010, Valencia. E-mail: laura.monro[email protected] ORCID: 0000-0002-8160-6623 Received: 29/11/2023 Accepted: 27/02/2024 How to cite this article: Monrós-Gaspar, Laura. “The Grotto as Neo-Victorian Heterotopia: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012)”. ES Review: Spanish Journal of English Studies, vol. 45, 2024, pp. 11– 30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24197/ersjes.45.2024.11-30 Open access article under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CCBY 4.0). Abstract: News of the discoveries of natural grottos filled the pages of newspapers and journals throughout the nineteenth century. Additionally, artificial grottos opened regularly for the entertainment of the public and were commonplace in the cultural and literary products of the period. In this article, I analyse neo-Victorian appropriations of nineteenth-century grottos as Foucauldian heterotopias through two case studies: Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012). Overall’s and Fox’s novels illustrate how the heterotopic features of the Victorian grotto are expanded in neo-Victorian fiction as counter-spaces of emplacement that enable heterochronic forms of resistance. Keywords: grotto; heterotopia; Victorian; Neo-Victorian; Sonia Overall; Essie Fox. Summary: The Grotto as neo-Victorian Heterotopia. Foucault’s Heterotopology and the Neo- Victorian Grotto. Neo-Victorian Grottos in Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012). Conclusions. Resumen: Descubrimientos de cuevas naturales coparon las páginas de la prensa del siglo diecinueve a la vez que se inauguraban grutas y cuevas artificiales para el entretenimiento de una sociedad que era testigo de cómo éstas se convertían en lugares comunes entre los productos culturales y literarios de su tiempo. En este artículo, analizamos la apropiación neo-victoriana de grutas y cuevas del siglo XIX como heterotopías foucauldianas a través de dos estudios de caso: The Realm of Shells (2006) de Sonia Overall y Elijah’s Mermaid (2012) de Essie Fox. Las dos novelas 12 Laura Monrós-Gaspar ES REVIEW. SPANISH JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 45 (2024): 11–30 E-ISSN 2531-1654 ilustran cómo los rasgos heterotópicos de la cueva victoriana son expandidos en la ficción neovictoriana como contra-emplazamientos que permiten formas de resistencia heterocrónica. Palabras clave: cuevas; heterotopía; victoriana; neo-victoriana; Sonia Overall; Essie Fox. Sumario: La cueva como heterotopía neo-victoriana. La heterotopía de Foucault y la cueva neovictoriana. Cuevas neo-victorianas en The Realm of Shells (2006) de Sonia Overall y Elijah’s Mermaid de Essie Fox (2012). Conclusiones. THE GROTTO AS NEO-VICTORIAN HETEROTOPIA One of the most fashionable forms of entertainment among the upper classes in the mid-eighteenth century was to visit Alexander Pope’s grotto in Twickenham. The public were drawn to this grotto until the late nineteenth century and newspapers report that visitors were able to inspect the attraction during the celebrations for the bicentenary of the birth of Pope (“The Provinces”). 1 Nineteenth-century travellers to the spot reminisced about the golden days of the grotto, which soon grew to be seen as a shrine for worship by intellectuals. The reporter of a London trip in Bell’s Life in London in 1824, for example, recalls one such visit as follows: We entered this famed subterraneous passage from the Thames, and found ourselves upon that spot where once sat in social and philosophic intercourse Swift and Atterbury, Pope and Bolingbroke, and the Nobles and wits who composed what is called the Augustan Age of English Literature. The charm of the association which this spot inspired recalled the men and events of Queen Anne’s reign. (“Visit to Hampton Court”) Recurring images of Pope’s grotto abound in the literature of the nineteenth century, both to praise and to denigrate the poet and as the epitome of poetic inspiration and romantic love. 2 Yet the grotto at Twickenham is but one of the many artificial caverns that captivated the Victorian imagination. Artificial grottos similar to Pope’s opened regularly for the entertainment of the public, and reports of the discoveries of new 1 In 1888, a performance of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was also held in the gardens of the Villa to entertain members of the “Irish party, half the Radical members, some Unionists and Conservatives, and a number of private persons” (“Midsummer Night’s Dream at Pope’s Villa”). 2 See, for example, George Colman, Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. The Grotto as Neo-Victorian Heterotopia . . . 13 ES REVIEW. SPANISH JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 45 (2024): 11–30 E-ISSN 2531-1654 natural grottos filled the pages of newspapers and journals throughout the century. 3 Eventually, grottos became an essential commodity in the nineteenth century for society as a whole. Whether as part of the entertainment industry, recurring aesthetic concern or evidence of the thirst for conquest of a growing and powerful empire, the Victorian grotto may be read as one of the many cultural products that outlines the everyday life of the Victorians. As such, neo- Victorian literature, in its eagerness to excavate the past for its consumption in the present (Shiller; Gay et al.; Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism; Robinson; Boehm-Schnitzer and Gruss), could not ignore that the grotto was constructed as a space of visual, literary, and other cultural production throughout the nineteenth century. At a 2015 international conference in Málaga, I first proposed the association of neo-Victorianism and Foucauldian heterotopias through the trope of the Victorian grotto (Monrós-Gaspar, “Of Grottos”). To date, only a limited number of articles, doctoral theses and book chapters have been published that link the two concepts (Ho; Scott; Costantini; Suwa; Esser Re-calibrating), and to my knowledge, none of these propose a methodological association of neo-Victorianism and heterotopic spaces as a theoretical concern. Fortunately, the fluid association between the two terms has deepened, and in 2022, Marie-Louise Kohlke and Akira Suwa, also participants at the 2015 conference, together with Elizabeth Ho coedited the first special issue of Humanities devoted to the fruitful and ongoing symbiosis of the two critical concepts (Kohlke et al.). With articles that address the heterotopic nature of cemeteries, sites of heritage, postcolonial others, Young Adult fiction, the country house, the laboratory and the concept of darkness, the contributors to the journal explored Foucauldian “counter-sites” and proposed new sites of heterotopic encounters in neo-Victorian literature. As Kohlke et al. argue in their introduction to the collection, “the fertile affinities revealed by considering heterotopia and neo-Victorianism in tandem, namely as cultural phenomena that facilitate new ways of thinking about the Long Nineteenth Century as defined by social spaces and their counter-structures or counter-emplacements” open up “a new archive of literary and cultural production” where “incongruous spaces for re-vision and contestation” abound (2). Given that one such type of space 3 See, for example, the new grotto discovered in the southern side of the mountain of Pausillipo (“Antiquities”). 14 Laura Monrós-Gaspar ES REVIEW. SPANISH JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 45 (2024): 11–30 E-ISSN 2531-1654 is undoubtedly the Victorian grotto (Monrós-Gaspar, “La ninfa Eco”), far too little attention has been paid to a comprehensive analysis of this trope in neo-Victorian literature. Research on the subject has been mostly restricted to landscape phenomenology as exemplified in the work undertaken by Arias (“(Sub)Urban Landscapes”) on Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006). This indicates a need to widen the corpus of research and critical approaches to map the cultural significance of grottos in neo-Victorian reimagining of the nineteenth century. To contribute to such a cartography, this study takes up Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells (2006) and Essie Fox’s Elijah’s Mermaid (2012) as two central cases that generate new insights into the trope, exploring for the first time neo- Victorian appropriations of nineteenth-century grottos as Foucauldian heterotopias. 1. FOUCAULT’S HETEROTOPOLOGY AND THE NEO-VICTORIAN GROTTO Foucault’s ideas on heterotopology, as is well-known, were mostly developed at a lecture delivered on 14 March 1967 to the Cercle d’études architecturales. The transcription of the lecture was only published almost twenty years later in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité (October 1984) as ‘Des espaces autres. Une conference inédite de Michel Foucault’ and first translated into English in 1986 (Dehaene and De Cauter 13). 4 In his lecture, Foucault identifies the external space as the space “in which we live…in which the erosion of our lives, of our time and our history occurs, the space that torments and consumes us” and is defined by diverse sets of relations (Foucault 16). Some such external spaces are capable of suspecting, neutralizing or inverting their relations with other sites (Foucault 17). As I discuss below, applying the theoretical principles that underpin the construction of such contesting counter-spaces of emplacement and identity allows us to analyse the use of the grotto in neo- Victorian fiction as an element of reconstruction and revision of the self; and also as a heterochronic space where the past merges with the present to challenge prescriptive relations and overcome traumatic experiences. As I have argued elsewhere (Monrós-Gaspar, “Of Grottos”), the Victorian grotto can be read in Foucauldian terms as both a heterotopia of 4 The translation consulted for this article was the revised and annotated translation by Lieven De Cauter and Michiel Dehaene published in 2008 under the title “Of Other Spaces”. The Grotto as Neo-Victorian Heterotopia . . . 15 ES REVIEW. SPANISH JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 45 (2024): 11–30 E-ISSN 2531-1654 crisis and a heterotopia of compensation. It may be considered the former because the grotto represents a sacred and forbidden place where individuals in transformation—in a state of crisis in relation to society— are concealed: for example, prophetic voices entranced by frenzied visions, magic beings between two worlds and young men and women on the brink of love. 5 Regarding the latter, Foucault explains that the role of a heterotopia of compensation is to “create another space, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is disorderly, ill construed and sketchy” (Foucault 21). Therefore, the Victorian grotto can function as a heterotopia of compensation in two contrasting ways. While it provides a real space of perfection where the voyeuristic male gaze can shape, mould and make use of an ideal woman, it also offers a space for female empowerment beyond the restrictions of Victorian England (Monrós-Gaspar, “Of Grottos”). The two texts considered in this article illustrate how the heterotopic features of the Victorian grotto are expanded in neo-Victorian fiction as cultural constructs that enable heterochronic forms of resistance. In the second principle underpinning the concept of heterotopia, Foucault explains that, in the course of its history, a society can make a heterotopia that exists, and has not ceased to exist, function in a very different way; for each heterotopia…can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another. (Foucault 18) As I demonstrate in the next section of this article, the Margate Shell Grotto fulfils various functions in the construction of the female protagonists’ identities both in Overall’s and Fox’s novels. Memory and experience are the pillars that sustain the writers’ historical reconstruction and contemporary appropriation of such functions, which coincides well with Mitchell’s arguments that neo-Victorian fiction encourages us to 5 Illustrations of such Victorian heterotopias abound. For example, Felicia Hemans invokes grotto fairies in her poems. In the introduction to her novel The Last Man (1826), Mary Shelley refers to her attempts to decipher the legacy of wisdom bequeathed by the Cumaean Sibyl in her cave. A grotto was the dwelling of a mysterious man in William Godwin’s Fleetwood; or, the New Man of Feeling (1805). George Meredith stirred up memories from an idyllic landscape with grottos in Diana of the Crossways (1885). Disraeli’s Sybil; or The Two Nations (1845) sets a hazardous escape route in a subterranean grotto. 16 Laura Monrós-Gaspar ES REVIEW. SPANISH JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 45 (2024): 11–30 E-ISSN 2531-1654 “resist privileging history’s non-fictional discourse” (4) in readings of the past and rely on the twentieth-century discourses of memory and nonacademic forms of history to reinvent Victorian cultural products. The multiple functions of the neo-Victorian grotto across time are also related to the sixth and final principle in Foucault’s heterotopology, which relies on the idea that every heterotopia has a function in relation to the rest of the space. The neo-Victorian grotto is a site of concealment and transformation, but also of empowerment; thus, the grotto provides a counterpoint to the mainstream spaces of Victorian society that mould mainstream identities. As such, and in correlation with the fifth principle of Foucault’s counter-spaces, which presupposes “a system of opening and closing that both isolates and makes them penetrable” (Foucault 21), the neo-Victorian grotto functions as a site of passage between temporalities but also between innocence and experience, submission, and empowerment. Ultimately, as exemplified in Overall’s and Fox’s novels, the grotto denotes a space where female minds and bodies are either constrained or challenged. The third principle in Foucault’s heterotopology sustains that “the heterotopia has the power to juxtapose in a single real place several spaces, several emplacements that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 19), which he exemplifies with the space of the theatre, the cinema, or the garden. In the fourth principle, Foucault nourishes the idea that heterotopic spaces are open to heterochronisms where time is accumulated indefinitely, as in museums and libraries (Foucault 20). Historically, the intriguing life of artificial grottos began in the Hellenistic period, when grottos were built to honour water spirits (Jackson 4). Over time it became a custom to erect nymphaeum—temples and artificial grottos—around public fountains, Roman villas and gardens. During the sixteenth and through the eighteenth century, the tradition of artificial grottos occupied a place of honour in Italy. The practice then spread to England, where it remained in fashion until the late twentieth century (Jackson). Just as in the Foucauldian garden, the superimposed meanings of the grotto, from the Hellenistic period to the nineteenth century in Western culture, juxtapose in the same space two emplacements that might seem incompatible: sacred spaces of worship and ludic spaces of recreation. Additionally, the grotto overlays the present with fossilized reminiscences of the past: decorations of embedded minerals, shells and mosaics serve as a catalyst for reading the grotto as a neo-Victorian heterochronic space, where the echoes of the past coexist with the voices of the present. In the The Grotto as Neo-Victorian Heterotopia . . . 17 ES REVIEW. SPANISH JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 45 (2024): 11–30 E-ISSN 2531-1654 section that follows, I support my claim that neo-Victorian grottos are best understood as Foucauldian heterotopias through two case studies that reveal the utility of the heterotopia as an analytical frame. The two selected novels re-write the nineteenth-century stories of Margate Shell Grotto to challenge the prescriptive social norms for women and restore their identities. 2. NEO-VICTORIAN GROTTOS IN SONIA OVERALL’S THE REALM OF SHELLS (2006) AND ESSIE FOX’S ELIJAH’S MERMAID (2012) A mere two years before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, a legendary cavern in England was first discovered by a young boy, Joshua Newlove, during excavations for the foundations of a new school in Margate. From that moment on, the cavern was known as Margate Shell Grotto. It is said that when Joshua lowered his head into a hole in the ground, he emerged mesmerized by the shell tunnels he found there. With over four million shells and two thousand square feet of mosaic, the fascinating mystery surrounding the construction of the shell grotto still remains unresolved. This might explain why from 1838 until now, the grotto is one of the major local attractions in Margate (Haslam). The discovery of the grotto was widely covered by the press of the time with illustrations of its tunnels and secret passages (“Links with the Past”). Provincial newspapers announced the opening of the mysterious grotto in 1838, highlighting its inscrutable aisles: The grotto...extends to a great distance under the hill, and is laid out in serpentine walks, alcoves, and passages of considerable extent, the sides being studded with shells, formed into elaborate and curious devices, and doubtless executed by torchlight. (Kendal Mercury) Even though no conclusive evidence exists of the grotto’s origins to date, some contemporary newspapers ventured to set its construction around the time of the “Saxon heptarchy” (Kendal Mercury). This increased the allure of the place to those inquisitive minds to history and to the recovery of the past in Victorian England. Much speculation surrounded the purpose of the chapels and tunnels of the grotto, which were believed to have been built as a place of worship. Conjectures reached the twentieth century with intellectuals championing both its ancient origin and modern construction alike (“Nota Bene”). 18 Laura Monrós-Gaspar ES REVIEW. SPANISH JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 45 (2024): 11–30 E-ISSN 2531-1654 In an intertextual and metatextual dialogue between the past and the present, both Sonia Overall and Essie Fox interrogate the Victorian penchant for grottos in The Realm of Shells (2006) and Elijah’s Mermaid (2012), respectively. The two writers create a credible representation of the Margate grotto, interspersing historical veracity with fictive plots. As I shall contend next, Overall and Fox refigure the Victorian grotto through revisionist resignification of the trope to position women as central agents of the narrative. Both reshape past abuses of female minds and bodies into future processes of empowerment by reimagining Victorian grottos in revisited heterotopias. Overall and Fox’s approaches to the Victorian grotto in relation to female bodies may be discussed through various theoretical approaches to neo-Victorian fiction, such as trauma theory and notions of the trace. 6 Because, as Heilmann and Llewellyn put it, “Victorian sexuality and the way we re-imagine it . . . holds an irresistible appeal for the neo-Victorian imagination. The nature of our interest in the Victorian body arguably reveals less about the Victorians and more about our own preoccupations” (Neo-Victorianism 107). Due to practical constraints, this article cannot provide a full discussion of such theories as applied to the heterotopic space of the grotto in neo-Victorian fiction. Still, while the focus of the article remains on the analysis of the Foucauldian trope, I bring to light questions about the relationship between neo-Victorian appropriations of grottos and trauma that may be further explored in future publications. In Nostalgic Postmodernism, Gutleben poses two questions that are central, Bowler and Cox argue, to the “neo-Victorian project” (Bowler and Cox 5) and have remained in neo-Victorian criticism since (Gay et al.; Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism; Robinson; Boehm-Schnitzer and Gruss). First, Gutleben questions whether the contemporary novel “sets out to rectify certain historical wrongs, to fight against specific prejudice and to subvert ideological and aesthetic commonplaces” (Gutleben 7). Then, Gutleben goes on to argue whether it simply “takes over a set of themes, of characters and of novelistic devices either because they appear as tokens of an unsurpassed art or because they perpetuate the immense success of the Golden Age of the British novel” (Gutleben 7). According to Renk, women writers’ approach to the neo-Victorian project is revisionist when they address “the ways in which gender and sexuality 6 See, for example, Arias (“Traces and Vestiges”), Onega and Ganteau (Contemporary Trauma Narratives), and Scott. The Grotto as Neo-Victorian Heterotopia . . . 19 ES REVIEW. SPANISH JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 45 (2024): 11–30 E-ISSN 2531-1654 are constructed in the Victorian era” (3). The same argument permeates Maier and Ayres’ edited volume on neo-Victorian representations of female madness. Therefore, even if neither Overall nor Fox defend an explicit feminist stance in their narratives, 7 the structure, plot, narrative voice and psychological depiction of the female characters in the two novels point to an intentional redefinition of female identities. For both Overall and Fox, the Margate grotto becomes—at very specific moments in the novels—the crime scene for the worst abuses. The sense of antiquity and exoticism occasionally associated with Victorian grottos wanes, and the once-fantastic pleasure domes are linked to anxiety and oppression. In a determined effort to overcome such abuses and re-define their identities, Frances and Pearl—the two heroines of the respective novels—contest and reinvent the space of the merciless grotto by recreating experiences that free their bodies through their own narratives. As such, they confirm the neo-Victorian premise that contemporary narratives remodel past social histories to “provide mechanisms of resilience” that restore wronged minds and bodies (Onega and Ganteau, “Introduction” 5). Inspired by one of the display cases in Margate’s grotto Museum, 8 Sonia Overall’s The Realm of Shells was first published in 2006. The book is based on the discovery and exploitation of the site from the naive yet truthful eyes of the Newlove children. The narrative voice combines the internal monologue of a little girl—Frances Newlove, Joshua’s sister and daughter of the schoolmaster who owned the ground—with the formal letter-writing of the seventy-year-old Frances who recalls the dark secrets of her infancy at the grotto from the perspective of the main female character. After biographical research into the real Newloves and the lives and customs of Margate residents in the 1830s, Overall recreates the characters who developed around the place from Frances’s perspective. We therefore learn about their education, family, and social relations, including Captain Easter, the antagonist of the novel. The book, Overall claims, “is essentially a novel about place, about how a place can influence 7 With regard to The Realm of Shells, Overall claims, “I didn’t write the women in this book with any gender agenda. Having said that, it's impossible to ignore nineteenthcentury attitudes towards women” (4). 8 “In one of the display cases is a potted history of the shell grotto’s ‘discovery’, in 1835, by Joshua Newlove . . . I read this, as most visitors do, before going into the grotto. It was a good story but it didn't mean much without seeing the place. Then I went into the chalk tunnel and saw the scale of the site and quality of the shell work. . . It was the central image for a story that unfolded over the next few months of research” (Overall 9). 26 Laura Monrós-Gaspar ES REVIEW. SPANISH JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES 45 (2024): 11–30 E-ISSN 2531-1654 “woven together out of ongoing stories” (131) and open up further analysis of the neo-Victorian grotto in other eminently spatial mediums such as theatre. Whether or not the fictional neo-Victorian grotto addressed in this article may find its corollaries in other neo-Victorian genres and media is still a question to be answered. Nonetheless, the porosity of the performing arts in the nineteenth century—which allow grottos to appear recurrently in ballet and opera but also in burlesque and pantomimes (Monrós-Gaspar, “La ninfa Eco”)—together with the variety of genres in which the Victorian grotto is adapted, transformed, and transposed onstage at present expands the possibilities to new, and still unexplored, neo-Victorian heterotopic grottos. FUNDING The research carried out for this article was funded by the research project AICO2021/225 (Generalitat Valenciana) at the Universitat de València. REFERENCES “Antiquities.” West Kent Guardian, 22 Aug. 1840, p. 5. Arias, Rosario. “(Sub)Urban Landscapes and Perception in Neo-Victorian Fiction.” Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment, edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, pp. 149–64. 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