The Ethics of Unbelief in Vernon Lee and William James

Chapter 1 explores Vernon Lee’s argument for an ethics of unbelief and her struggle to practice this ethics in literature which, she feared, had an inbuilt tendency to comforting falsehoods. The first part of the chapter outlines Lee’s case against William James and Friedrich Nietzsche whose work, she felt, offered inducements to belief in spite of their protestations to the contrary. Lee shared the view of prominent Rationalists in thinking that James made it possible for his readers to believe in almost anything, except, that is, the arguments of unbelievers. Lee offered ‘responsible unbelief’—belief in the believable—as an altogether more rational, proportionate, and humble alternative to the immoderate and masculinist versions she found in her peers. The final section of this chapter explores Lee’s experimental fiction, Satan the Waster (1918), a genre-defying ‘novel’ in which Lee tests the extent to which imaginative literature can be made to serve a Rationalist agenda. The questions that Lee raises in Satan set the agenda for this book as a whole: given the ease with which language flows into necessary fictions, can literature ever accommodate or encourage unbelief in the strong ethical sense of belief only in the believable? What forms of representation, if any, might be adequate to the expression of a ‘responsible’ unbelief?