Doing It With Mirrors:

Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity, The Prestige and The Illusionist

Abstract

This essay argues that at its most sophisticated and playful, neo-Victorianism engages the reader/spectator in a conjuring game of duplicity and revelatory enlightenment, mimicking the strategies of Victorian magicians. Drawing on the history of late-Victorian magic, it contends that the combination of Victorian narratives of stage illusion with the more contemporary concept of Baudrillardian simulation and simulacra allows us to access the specific levels of metatextual misdirection provided by a number of recent films and fictions: Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), adapted from Christopher Priest’s eponymous novel of 1995, Neil Burger’s The Illusionist (2006), based on Steven Millhauser’s short story ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’ (1990), and Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999). My argument resides in the interpretation of the trope of the trick and how it always returns us to a reflection on the nature of our engagement with and desire of the neo-Victorian (literary or filmic) text.