Self-Fashioning Illusions: Twinship, Subjectivity, and Neo-Victorianism in Christopher Priest’s The Prestige

Abstract

Examining the conflicting approaches to the fragmentation of the self and the feasibility of self-awareness featured in Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige (1995), this article reflects on the evaluation, and subsequent reinvention, of the Victorian era in the genre commonly known as neo-Victorian fiction. Alfred Borden, the novel’s Victorian protagonist, fashions himself as a unique and unified individual even though his identity is, in fact, composite and alternatingly shared between twin brothers. In contrast, Andrew Westley, Borden’s twentieth-century descendant, experiences an instinctive sense of division through which he rationalizes his life. Featured in temporally distinct storylines, these conflicting perspectives reflect the tensions at work in the neo-Victorian return to the Victorian past. Silencing multiplicity and negating fragmentation, the Victorian characters echo scholarly objections to the use of the term ‘Victorian’: its apparent assertion of coherence and homogeneity when it is actually called to signify an extremely diverse historical period. Conversely, by means of the twentieth-century protagonist’s need to comprehend and embrace division, a need which is fulfilled through Andrew’s familiarization with and acceptance of his past, the novel acknowledges the multivalence of the ‘Victorian’ and its indisputable connection to the present. Exploring Victorian and twentieth-century appreciations of subjectivity, The Prestige sheds light into neo-Victorianism’s self-fashioning strategies, raising the question whether and to what extent neo-Victorian reconfigurations of the Victorian era (re)discover the past, or operate on our potentially misleading preconceptions about the nineteenth century.