Abstract

This essay examines the narrative deception employed in Sarah Waters's Affinity, a novel detailing an elaborate confidence trick that also doublecrosses the reader. Narrated primarily from the point of view of a middle-class prison visitor, Margaret Prior, we learn what she only realizes too late, namely that her own relationship to both the built environment and the various written means by which it is documented is insecure. Despite establishing a panoptical structure, Waters ultimately reveals the relationship between sight and knowledge to be skewed in favour of those whom Victorian middle-class society refuses to see: the criminal, the 'deviant' and the serving-classes. Both a ghost story and not a ghost story (the occult is ultimately debunked in this text), Terry Castle's concept of the apparitional lesbian ultimately offers a framework for our exploration of the relationship between all-female desire, invisibility, and presence in Waters's Affinity © 2006 Taylor & Francis.