SOURCE: "Fantasmagoria and Optics in Théophile Gautier's 'Arria Marcella'," in The Shape of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Seventh International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Olena H. Saciuk, Greenwood Press, 1990, pp. 85-92.

In the following essay, Crichfield explores how the scientific acceptance of optical illusion propelled its use as a literary device in Gautier's "Arria Marcella. "

Recent scholarship on nineteenth-century French literature, and on the fantastic specifically, has increasingly turned its attention to the relevance of the relationships between scopic pulsions and literary illusion. In La Fantasmagorie: Essai sur l'optique fantastique (1982), for example, Max Milner explores the part that new technologies for the creation of optical illusion played in the expanded receptivity to the fantastic in the nineteenth century. Rosemary Jackson, in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981), proposes the notion that the structure of the fantastic element in literature conforms to the...