Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu de Vernon Lee : l’impossibilité balzacienne de la représentation dans Oke of Okehurst et Dionea

In her essay The Blame of Portraits (1904), Franco-English writer and philosopher of aesthetics Vernon Lee levels a fundamental criticism against the art of portraiture, which, according to her, only exists through comparison – an imperfect, impossible comparison – with a living model that exceeds the mimetic power of art. This observation echoes Honoré de Balzac’s own thinking in The Unknown Masterpiece, in which the artist Frenhofer searches for an impossible aesthetic ideal that leads only to his self-destruction and the obliteration of aesthetic codes. Balzac’s story thus reveals a fundamental conflict within the European artistic project, which Lee reworks in her Gothic short stories Oke of Okehurst and Dionea. Like Frenhofer, Lee’s artists are confronted with the impossibility to compare the feminine ideal with the portrait they are powerless to create. In turn, this incapacity questions the very possibility of artistic transcendence that motivates European art. This essay analyses Lee’s Gothic rewriting of this Balzacian crisis of artistic representation and reflects on the sociopoetical significance of transforming Frenhofer’s apparent madness into an aesthetic form of haunting that implicitly threatens every artist.