![]() In Lee’s “A Wicked Voice” (1890) and Cather’s The Troll Garden (1905), characters experience symphonic and operatic music which not only haunts their psyches, but extends beyond the Pleasure Principle, thus resulting in a jouissance through which the protagonists are able to momentarily escape from the weight of physicality. Though separated by over a decade, differing interpretations of literary theory and technique, and the wide azure Atlantic Ocean, the English aesthetic author Vernon Lee and the American novelist Willa Cather both struggled with the understanding of not only the unconscious, but also the method by which the psyche might be unfettered and freed from societal ideologies of the sexed body. “The myth of the sirens reminds us of the jouissance of music, the pleasure of surrender and engulfment, and the fears of making bad choices under the influence of uncontrollable substances-and the dangers of dissolving a safe distance between self and other.” Linda Phyllis Austern (60) ![]() Music, Jouissance Vernon Lee, Willa Cather ![]()
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