“That room has an evil reputation”: Gendered Spaces and Nonconformity
in Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst; or, The Phantom Lover”
Emilie Laurent
Abstract
This article reads Vernon Lee’s short story “Oke of Okehurst” through the lens of gendered material culture, prevalent in the Victorian times the story aims to reflect. The article argues that in this tale the wife’s haunted drawing room stands as the site of a battle between competing ideologies regarding a woman’s and a man’s place within the Victorian household. Culturally perceived as the impenetrable space wherein the wife can channel her imaginative power into escapist fantasies, this room ultimately enables her to cross gender boundaries and to negotiate her own sexual agency outside the constraints of heterosexual marriage, morphing it into a site of male emasculation that destabilises Victorian gender roles, entrapping the husband into female roles and undermining masculine rationality. Nevertheless, the story’s apparent polarisation of gender roles and domestic spaces is undermined by the narrative ambivalence of the simultaneously attractive and uncanny drawing room. This article thus also discusses the masculine narrative voice’s ambiguous position as outsider and mediator in this collapsing Victorian household, aiming to determine whether this extreme portrayal of gender roles encourages readers to sympathise with the patriarchal loss of authority or with the assertion of female agency.
Keywords
Vernon Lee; “Oke of Okehurst”; uncanny; Victorian ideology; gender roles; material culture; hysteria; narration; Victorian household
Date of Acceptance: 7 July 2025
Date of Publication: 10 July 2025
Double Blind Peer Reviewed
Recommended Citation:
Laurent, Emilie. 2025. “That room has an evil reputation”: Gendered Spaces and Nonconformity in Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst; or, The Phantom Lover.” Victorian Popular Fictions, 7.1: 38-52. ISSN: 2632-4253 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.46911/OPGB3027
Return to Contents page of VPFJ 7.1
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Call that reading? Creative Approaches to Literary Studies and Literary Heritage