Neovictorianism and/or antivictorianism? The Victorian age in affinity by Sarah Waters

The novel by Sarah Waters Affinity is under analysis from the points of view of metahistoricism, historiographical prose and so much peculiar to the English literature of the turn of the XX and XXI centuries interest to the Past on the whole and the Victorian Age in particular. The special stress is done at the demythologization of the Victorian times on the basis of which the writer constructs her model of that decisive for national character formation period. Some key features of the novel's genre, plot and narration are shown. The dialogue of the two main female characters’ diaries as the structural basis of the novel is stressed. Big attention is paid to Sarah Waters’ approaches to the Woman Question and Queer Relations in the Victorian Age as she sees it, revealing Victorian social and gender hypocrisy. Her approach to the phenomenon of a ‘New/Other Woman’ is also sterssed; because of it the writer’s ways of depicting female characters’ dynamics strongly dependent on social, moral and cultural circumstances are analyzed. Peculiar use of sensational, Gothic, social and psychological novel patterns are stressed, as well as directly connected with that motifs of mad woman, imprisonment, criminal underworld, pseudo-mystery and spiritualism. Sarah Waters’ role in the development of such an important for contemporary English literary process genre conglomeration as ‘neovictorian novel is demonstrated.