Afterword: Voices Beyond the Victorian Era? Wesley Stace and Ventriloquism

Abstract

In the heyday of ventriloquism as a form of popular entertainment it was typically the dummy that had the last word and yet, as the discussion of the dummy stage performance in Chapter 1 explained, it is really never the ‘dummy’ speaking, but a knowing illusion on the part of the ventriloquist and a willing self-deception on the part of the audience. An attempt to have ‘the last word’ on any topic, particularly on such elusive matters as gender construction, sexuality, agency, authorial voice — let alone ventriloquism — is surely also self-deceptive and illusory. A central aim of this book has been to conceptualize neo-Victorian ventriloquism as a poly-vocal exchange. Lest I fulfil the role of dummy in trying to make an Afterword ‘the last word’, as if it ever could be, this final section of the book seeks to acknowledge the ways in which the representation of ventriloquism in contemporary literature with an investment in re-voicing the past cannot be confined wholly within the ‘Victorian’ era.