ABSTRACT
Lucas Malet’s 1896 novel The Carissima announces its concerns late nineteenth-century modernity—specifically, those surrounding the modern woman—in conspicuous fashion, both by reference to Alphonse Daudet’s 1882 play La Menteuse (The Liar) and by the novel’s subheading A Modern Grotesque. Malet’s plot revolves around Englishman Constantine Leversedge, a man who, having made his fortune on the outskirts of the empire, arrives in Geneva to marry Charlotte Perry, his long-standing fiancée. Prior to his arrival, Leversedge has witnessed a grotesque spectacle of death on the South African Veldt—the murdered bodies of a camp, survived only by a dog last seen consuming the remains of a child. Malet’s phantom dog operates as a decentralising symbol of abjection, of the repressed desires and fears occasioned by a dissolution of gender boundaries, dramatised through the degraded colonial masculinity of one protagonist, and the subversive feminine stratagems of the other.
