What Is "Sensational" About the "Sensation Novel"?

Author(s): Patrick Brantlinger

Source: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jun., 1982), pp. 1-28
Published by: University of California Press
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 What Is "Sensational"
about the
"Sensation Novel"?

PATRICK BRANTLINGER

EVEN THOUGH "sensation novels" were a minor subgenre of

British fiction that flourished in the 1860s only to die out a decade
or two later, they live on in several forms of popular culture, obvi-
ously so in their most direct offspring-modern mystery, detective,
and suspense fiction and films. The sensation novel was and is
sensational partly because of content: it deals with crime, often
murder as an outcome of adultery and sometimes of bigamy, in
apparently proper, bourgeois, domestic settings. But the fictions of
Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles
Reade, Mrs. Henry Wood, and some other popular authors of the
1860s have special structural qualities as well, which can perhaps be
summed up historically as their unique mixture of contemporary
domestic realism with elements of the Gothic romance, the Newgate
novel of criminal "low life," and the "silver fork" novel of scandalous
and sometimes criminal "high life."
The best sensation novels are also, as Kathleen Tillotson points
out, "novels with a secret," or sometimes several secrets, in which
new narrative strategies were developed to tantalize the reader by

? 1982 by The Regents of the University of California 0029-0564/82/020001 + 28$00.50

[1]

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2 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
withholding information rather than divulging it.' The forthright
declarative statements of realistic fiction are, in a sense, now punc-
tuated by question marks. This structural feature is crucial for the
later development of the mystery novel, though it also points back-
ward to both Gothic and Newgate fictions. Crimes do not always
involve mysteries in earlier fictions, but sometimes they do, as in
Oliver Twzst and The Mysteries of Udolpho. The emergence of the
protagonist as detective or of the detective as an aid to the pro-
tagonist -most obviously in the case of Sergeant Cuff in The Moon-
stone-marks the evolution of a genre of popular fiction which
refuses to follow the path of direct revelation prescribed by realism
but instead hides as much as it reveals. Jacques Derrida argues that
it may be "impossible not to mix genres" because "lodged within the
heart of the law [of genre] itself [is] a law of impurity or a principle
of contamination."2 Derrida suggests that the peculiar mark or
structural feature that defines any genre can never belong exclu-
sively to that genre but always falls partly outside it. The element of
mystery in a sensation novel I take to be such a distinguishing
feature, one that both sets sensation novels apart from more realistic
fictions and points to their relatedness to some other romantic and
popular forms.
Without drawing hard-and-fast lines between it and earlier
Gothic romances or later detective fictions, the sensation novel can
be defined from at least three different but complementary perspec-
tives. The most familiar is historical, involving the situating of cer-
tain novels and novelists in their 1 860s context of Gothic and
domestic realism in fiction, the powerful influence of Dickens, stage
melodrama, "sensational" journalism, and bigamy trials and divorce
law reform. A second perspective involves isolating those structural
features of the sensation novel genre that, in Derrida's terms, repre-
sent its peculiar mark or marks, even while recognizing that such
features may partially characterize some other genres as well -or in
other words, that it may be "impossible not to mix genres." In the
second section, I argue that an apparent disintegration of narrative
authority, caused by the introduction of secular mystery as a main

"'The Lighter Reading of the Eighteen-Sixties," Introduction to Wilkie Collins,

The Woman in White, Riverside ed. (Boston: Houghton, 1969), p. xv.
2"The Law of Genre," trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry, 7 (1980), 57.

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The "Sensation Novel" 3
ingredient of plots, is an especially significant trait of the sensation
novel. The third perspective is psychological. Perhaps no genre of
high or popular culture has so often been subjected to psycho-
analytic scrutiny as the mystery novel. I shall suggest in the final
section that, as a forebear of modern detective fiction, the sensation
novel shares several of its psychological properties. Taken together,
these perspectives should provide a fairly comprehensive definition
of a genre of fiction that stands midway between romanticism and
realism, Gothic "mysteries" and modern mysteries, and popular and
high culture forms-a genre, in other words, that like all genres
is itself a mixture of sometimes contradictory forms, styles, and
conventions.

In a review entitled "The Enigma Novel," a writer in The Spec-

tator for 28 December 1861 declared: "We are threatened with a
new variety of the sensation novel, a host of cleverly complicated
stories, the whole interest of which consists in the gradual unravelling
of some carefully prepared enigma. "3 Although not every tale that
has come to be labeled a sensation novel involves a mystery-Charles
Reade, for example, rarely withholds the sources of villainy from his
readers, qualifying as a sensationalist chiefly on the grounds of
content-many imply by their very structures that domestic tran-
quility conceals heinous desires and deeds. And although its subject
is no more sensational than those of The Woman in White (1860),
No Name (1862), and Armadale (1866), Collins's The Moonstone
(1868) is often called the first mystery-cum-detective novel which,
according to Dorothy Sayers, set a standard of perfection that later
mystery writers have failed to meet.4
Just as much as the introduction of sex and violence, about
which the first reviewers of sensation novels raised a great hue and
cry, the introduction of mystery into a novel form that seems other-
wise to follow the conventions of domestic realism posed disturbing
questions. These questions arise on both the thematic and structural

3"The Enigma Novel," rpt. in Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman
Page (London and Boston: Routledge, 1974), p. 109.
4Introd., The Omnibus of Crime, ed. Dorothy L. Sayers (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1929), p. 25.

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4 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
levels. On the former level, there is the problem of the relation of
mysteries of crime, adultery, skeletons in family closets to religious
mystery. By a kind of metaphoric sleight of hand, the Gothic ro-
mance had managed to make secular mystery seem like a version of
religious mystery. The Monk, for example, straddles the fence
between a gruesome, sadomasochistic thriller and a religious fantasy
with horrific but just religious penalties visited upon Ambrosio at
the end. The mysteries in Uncle Silas (1864), Lady Audley's Secret
(1862), East Lynne (1861), and The Moonstone, however, have not
even a quasi-religious content. Le Fanu perpetuates the supernatural
elements of Gothic as metaphors (Silas Ruthvyn as werewolf or vam-
pire), and Collins links speculations about fate to the accidental
turnings of his multiple plots. Everything that happens in The
Moonstone, for example, can be interpreted as the fulfillment of the
curse that follows the diamond, while everything that happens in
Armadale seems predestined either because it is wildly coincidental
or because it has been predicted by Allan Armadale's dream. But
the sensation novel involves both the secularization and the domesti-
cation of the apparently higher (or at any rate, more romantic)
mysteries of the Gothic romance. Ironically, just as novel-writing
seems to be growing more "sensational" in the 1860s, it is also growing
tamer. From one perspective, the sensation novel represents an infu-
sion of romantic elements into realism. From another, it represents
the reduction of romance to fit Biedermeier frames.
During the 1860s "sensation" and "sensational" were attached -
usually with more than a dash of sarcasm - to artifacts other than
novels. There were "sensation dramas" at least as early as Dion
Boucicault's melodramatic hit of 1861, The Colleen Bawn, and also
"sensational" advertisements, products, journals, crimes, and scan-
dals. Theatrical "sensations" like Boucicault's or like Tom Taylor's
The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863), which features the professional
detective and master disguise artist Hawkshaw, suggest the connec-
tion between stage melodrama and the sensation novel that fore-
shadows the relationship between best sellers and the cinema today.5
Most of the writers of sensation novels also wrote melodramas, and
best sellers like East Lynne and Lady Audley's Secret were quickly

5There is a brilliant exposition of this idea in T. S. Eliot, "Wilkie Collins and

Dickens," Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), pp. 409-18;
originally published in TLS, 4 Aug. 1927, pp. 525-26.

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The "Sensation Novel" 5
dramatized. With his enthusiasm for all things theatrical, Dickens
set the pattern. "Every writer of fiction," he declared, ". . . writes,
in effect, for the stage."6 In the preface to his early novel, Basil
(1852), Collins asserted that "the Novel and the Play are twin-sisters
in the family of Fiction" and invoked the poetic license for "extra-
ordinary accidents and events" that he associated with the theater.7
And Charles Reade thought of himself as a "philosophical melo-
dramatist" first, a novelist second. Any piece of fiction-his own,
Smollett's Peregrine Pickle, Trollope's Ralph the Heir, Zola's L'As-
sommoir-was grist for Reade's melodramatic mill. In more than
one instance he even converted a play into a novel, rewriting Masks
and Faces (1852) as Peg Woffington (1853) and extracting White
Lies (1857) from an earlier script.8 In his analysis of sensation fiction
for the Spectator, Richard Holt Hutton states what was often liter-
ally the case: "The melodrama of the cheap theatres is an acted
sensational novel." 9
As with melodrama, so with the sensation novel: violent and
thrilling action, astonishing coincidences, stereotypic heroes, hero-
ines, and villains, much sentimentality, and virtue rewarded and
vice apparently punished at the end. As Winifred Hughes argues,
however, "With the rise of the sensation novel, melodrama . . . lost
its innocence." Partly because of its moral ambiguity, the sensation
novel was felt to be dangerous by many of its first critics, while stage
melodrama seemed less threatening. Traditional melodrama cele-
brated virtue and domesticity, but the sensation novel questions
them, at least by implication. Of course the subversive qualities of
novels like Lady Audley's Secret are not overt. As Hughes points out,
bigamy- that favorite "sensation" crime (next to murder) - "has the
advantage of making sexual offense" or "vice" punishable. And it
also validates the institution of marriage in a backhanded way. 10
Bigamy, adultery, and the problem of divorce law were much
6Dickens, quoted by J. W. T. Ley, The Dickens Circle (New York: Dutton, 1919),
p. 87.
7"Letter of Dedication," Basil, 3 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1852), I, xiii. Also
see Basil (1862 rev. ed.; rpt. New York: Dover, 1980), p. v.
8According to Wayne Burns, Reade thought of fiction "as a lesser form of the
drama" (Charles Reade: A Study in Victorian Authorship [New York: Bookman,
1961], p. 113; see esp. ch. 4).
9[Richard Holt Hutton], "Sensational Novels," Spectator, 8 Aug. 1868, p. 932.
I'The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 71, 31.

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6 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
on the minds of Victorians in the 1860s. Jeanne Fahnestock has
shown the influence of-among other "sensational" events-the
1861 Yelverton bigamy-divorce trial on the fiction of Braddon,
Reade, and others. "After the Yelverton revelations, the public was
painfully aware of the disgraceful accumulation of laws governing
marriage . . . which made bigamy legally possible" (Captain Yelver-
ton himself escaped without serious legal penalty)." Even in those
sensation novels whose plots do not hinge upon bigamy, there is a
strong interest in sexual irregularities, adultery, forced marriages,
and marriages formed under false pretenses. But rather than strik-
ing forthright blows in favor of divorce law reform and greater
sexual freedom, sensation novels usually tend merely to exploit
public interest in these issues. Wilkie Collins's concern with marriage
and divorce law in No Name and Man and WzJfe (1870) is excep-
tional, as are Charles Reade's themes of social reform and sexual
conflict in stories like Hard Cash (1863) and Griffith Gaunt (1866).
Partly because of its generally exploitative approach to contro-
versial issues like bigamy and adultery, the sensation novel was felt
to be disreputable by most contemporary reviewers. Henry James,
for example, writes about Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley's Secret
with half-contemptuous admiration, as "clever" and "audacious"
literary tricks that their author has managed to bring off by apply-
ing a "thoroughgoing-realism" to the "romance" of "vice.'"'a Espe-
cially when they dealt with bigamy, sensation novels seemed to be a
British equivalent of the suspect "French novels" that Robert Audley
carries about with him and sometimes reads in Lady Audley's Secret
(or, as Punch called it, Lady Disorderly's Secret). One reviewer of
Collins's No Name mistakenly declared the sensation novel to be "a
plant of foreign growth":

It comes to us from France, and it can only be imported in a mutilated

condition. Without entering on the relative morality or immorality of
French and English novelists, one may say generally that, with us, novels

""Bigamy: The Rise and Fall of a Convention," NCF, 36 (1981), 58. See also
Arvel B. Erickson and Fr. John R. McCarthy, "The Yelverton Case: Civil Legis-
lation and Marriage," Victorian Studies, 14 (1971), 275-91; and Mary Lyndon
Shanley, "'One Must Ride Behind': Married Women's Rights and the Divorce Act
of 1857," Victorian Studies, 25 (1982), 355-76.
12"Miss Braddon," rev. of Aurora Floyd, in Notes and Reviews (Cambridge,
Mass.: Dunster House, 1921), pp. 108-16; originally published in the Nation, 9
Nov. 1865, pp. 593-94.

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The "Sensation Novel" 7
turn upon the vicissitudes of legitimate love and decorous affection; while
in France they are based upon the working of those loves and passions
which are not in accordance with our rules of respectability.'3

This hardly gives British fiction prior to the 1860s its due with regard
to the illegitimate and indecorous. But subjects were broached in
sensation novels that many good Victorians thought inappropriate,
and the fact that these subjects seemed not to be addressed seriously
but merely "sensationally" made them all the more disreputable. No
doubt the greatest sensation of all was the discovery by many
respectable readers in the 1860s (though hardly unknown in prior
decades) that crime paid in fiction, as Count Fosco in The Woman
in White says it pays in life. James understands this; as he says in his
review of Aurora Floyd, "The novelist who interprets the illegitimate
world to the legitimate world, commands from the nature of his
position a certain popularity." 14
James is content to analyze the clever though shallow artistry by
which Braddon produces best sellers, but other reviewers saw in the
sensation novel something much more disturbing. The Archbishop
of York preached a sermon against sensation novels in the Hudders-
field Church Institute in 1864, in which he declared that "sensational
stories were tales which aimed at this effect simply - of exciting in
the mind some deep feeling of overwrought interest by the means of
some terrible passion or crime. They want to persuade people that
in almost every one of the well-ordered houses of their neighbours
there [is] a skeleton shut up in some cupboard." W. Fraser Rae, who
quotes the Archbishop in the North British Review (September
1865), describes sensation novels as "one of the abominations of the
age. "15
Negative responses to the sensation novel often echo negative
responses to Dickens. What Thackeray said in Catherine - that
Dickens romanticizes crime and dwells upon the most sordid and
"extravagant" aspects of life-was repeated many times over in the
reviews of Collins, Braddon, Wood, and Ouida. And just as the sen-
sation novel was felt to exercise a corrupting influence on higher

'3Unsigned review, rpt. in Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, pp. 134-35;
originally published in the opening number of the Reader, 3Jan. 1863, pp. 14-15.
'4James, "Miss Braddon," p. 115.
15The archbishop of York's sermon is quoted by W. Fraser Rae in "Sensation
Novelists: Miss Braddon," North British Review, 43, NS 4 (1865), 203 (British ed.).

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8 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
culture, Dickens's novels were often similarly viewed, as when Dr.
Thomas Arnold told Wordsworth that "his lads seemed to care for
nothing but Bozzy's next No., and the Classics suffered accord-
ingly."''6 All of Dickens's major novels involve crime and detection
at least tangentially, and many of the other ingredients of sensation
fiction are present in his work at least as early as Oliver Twist and
Barnaby Rudge. Thus, the former comes close to being both a
Newgate and a mystery novel: in unraveling the secret of Oliver's
parentage and thwarting Monks, Mr. Brownlow plays the role of the
full-fledged detectives in later novels. Oliver Twist also contains
foreshadowings of professional detectives in the Bow Street runners,
Blathers and Duff. Moreover, at least the metaphors in Oliver Twist
give it a magical, quasi-Gothic coloring, albeit more probably de-
rived from such sources as Grimm's Fairy Tales than from The Mys-
teries of Udolpho or Melmoth the Wanderer. Oliver's entrapment in
the underworld slums of the thieves is in one way not so different
from the entrapment of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines in their picturesque
alpine castles and abbeys, for despite the changes of location, sex,
and social message, they share the archetypal pattern of youthful
innocence threatened by deviltry. In any case, next to Dickens's
fiction, the Gothic tales of mystery, suspense, erotic awakening, and
quasi-supernatural terror of Mrs. Radcliffe and her successors were
the most important antecedents of the sensation novel of the 1860s.
Some sensation novels are indistinguishable from Gothic ro-
mances. Many of Le Fanu's stories of terror and the occult should
perhaps be categorized as Gothic rather than sensation fictions, if
only because of the dominance of supernatural over realistic ele-
ments. In the preface to Uncle Silas, Le Fanu rejects the new label
and invokes an older tradition:

May [the author] be permitted a few words ... of remonstrance against

the promiscuous application of the term "sensation" to that large school of
fiction which transgresses no one of those canons of construction and
morality which, in producing the unapproachable "Waverley Novels," their
great author imposed upon himself? No one, it is assumed, would describe

'6Wordsworth to Edward Moxon, April 1842, excerpted in Charles Dickens: A

Critical Anthology, ed. Stephen Wall (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p.
61. See also George Ford, Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel-Criticism
since 1836 (New York: Norton, 1965), pp. 39-43 and 177-79.

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The "Sensation Novel" 9
Sir Walter Scott's romances as "sensation novels"; yet in that marvellous
series there is not a single tale in which death, crime, and, in some form,
mystery, have not a place.'7

Scott may be the ancestor whom Le Fanu would most like to claim,
but his thinly veiled sadomasochistic tale of the captivity, deception,
near-seduction, and near-murder of an adolescent heroine points
more directly to Mrs. Radcliffe. Maud Ruthvyn suggests as much
when, about to explore the decaying mansion of her Uncle Silas, she
tells her maid: "I feel so like Adelaide, in the 'Romance of the
Forest,' the book I was reading to you last night, when she com-
menced her delightful rambles through the interminable ruined
abbey in the forest" (ch. 54, p. 358).
In the sensation novel, the Gothic is brought up to date and so
mixed with the conventions of realism as to make its events seem
possible if not exactly probable. In "sensationalizing" modern life,
however, the novelists paradoxically discovered that they were mak-
ing fictions out of the stuff that filled the newspapers every day.
Indeed, on one level they could even claim that to sensationalize was
to be realistic. In Victorian Studies in Scarlet, Richard D. Altick
points out that "every good new Victorian murder helped legitimize,
and prolong the fashion of sensational plots."'8 Historically there is
a direct relationship between the sensation novel and sensational
journalism, from the extensive crime reporting in the Times and the
Daily Telegraph to such early crime tabloids as the Illustrated Police
News. Collins based some of the details of The Moonstone on the
sensational news stories of the Constance Kent murder in 1860 and
the Northumberland Street murder in 1861. As Dickens modeled
Bucket on Inspector Field, so Collins modeled Sergeant Cuff on
Inspector Whicher, the chief detective in the Kent affair. And
Henry James writes of Lady Audley's Secret:

The novelty lay in the heroine being, not a picturesque Italian of the
fourteenth century, but an English gentlewoman of the current year, fa-
miliar with the use of the railway and the telegraph. The intense proba-

'7Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, "A Preliminary Word," Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-
Haugh, introd. Frederick Shroyer (New York: Dover, 1966), p. xvii; further cita-
tions in my text are to this edition.
18Victorian Studies in Scarlet (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 79.

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10 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
bility of the story is constantly reiterated. Modern England-the England
of to-day's newspaper-crops up at every step.'9

Much more disparagingly, Henry Mansel complained about the

emergence of "the criminal variety of the Newspaper Novel, a class
of fiction having about the same relation to the genuine historical
novel that the police reports of the 'Times' have to the pages of
Thucydides or Clarendon." All a writer of a sensation novel needed
to do, said Mansel, was to "keep an eye on the criminal reports of
the daily newspapers," which would virtually write his fiction for
him.20
Mansel's outcry against "the Newspaper Novel" comes espe-
cially close to Charles Reade. Of all the sensation novelists, Reade
was most dependent on the newspapers, just as he was also the most
involved in stage melodrama. When the Times criticized his A Ter-
rible Temptation (1871), partly for its portrayal of the "scarlet
woman" Rhoda Somerset, Reade wrote two letters to the editor
protesting that he had merely "dramatized" facts reported by the
Times. Indeed, all of his best novels, he said, were inspired by the
Times: "For 18 years, at least, the journal you conduct so ably has
been my preceptor, and the main source of my works-at all events
of the most approved." Reade proceeds to list several of his works
inspired by the Times. Of It Is Never Too Late to Mend, he says, "a
noble passage in the Times of September 7 or 8, 1853, touched my
heart [and] inflamed my imagination." Of Hard Cash, he says that
''an able and eloquent leader on private asylums" gave him the main
theme for his expose novel. And Put Yourself in His Place grew out
of Reade's perusal of Times articles "upon trades unions and trade
outrages."'" Reade is incensed that his favorite paper should com-
plain about the subjects of his novels when he takes those subjects
straight from that paper. He could argue that his novels were based
upon the "great facts" of the age and were therefore thoroughly
realistic. As he frequently declared, he was a writer of "romances
founded on facts." Those who wanted to dismiss his novels as melo-
dramatic, crude, or worse, had first to show that the facts were not
melodramatic or crude.

'9James, "Miss Braddon," pp. 112-13.

20[Henry Mansel], "Sensation Novels," Quarterly Review, 113 (1863), 501.
2'Readiana in The Works of Charles Reade, 9 vols. (New York: Peter Fenelon
Collier, n.d.), IX, 377-78.

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The "Sensation Novel" 11
II

Winifred Hughes points out that Reade's obsessive insistence on the

factual basis of his stories implies a lack of faith in the authority of
fictive imagination.22 A similar difficulty in claiming authority
marks the narrative structures of many sensation novels. Because
they blended romance with realism, the sensational with the domes-
tic and contemporary, improbable or at least infrequent events with
probable settings and characters, sensation novels posed difficulties
for their writers as well as their first readers. Murders and con-
spiracies do not lurk down every dark street, in the shadows of every
dark house. Or do they? Newspapers suggested otherwise, and how
could a sensation novelist who imitated the newspapers fail to be
realistic? Here is one way in which the conventions of fictional real-
ism come to be punctuated with question marks. Mary Elizabeth
Braddon states part of the creed of the sensation novelist when she
makes her amateur detective-hero, Robert Audley, tell his villainous
aunt:

"What do we know of the mysteries that may hang about the houses we
enter? If I were to go to-morrow into that commonplace, plebeian, eight-
roomed house in which Maria Manning and her husband murdered their
guest, I should have no awful prescience of that bygone horror. Foul deeds
have been done under the most hospitable roofs; terrible crimes have been
committed amid the fairest scenes, and have left no trace upon the spot
where they were done.... I believe that we may look into the smiling face of
a murderer, and admire its tranquil beauty."23

The reference to Maria Manning emphasizes the credibility of such

a character as Lady Audley, who is herself an incarnation of this
creed: her outward beauty-the blonde, blue-eyed, childlike but
also coquettish stereotype of female loveliness and innocence -masks
insanity, bigamy, homicide.
The plots of sensation novels lead to the unmasking of extreme
evil behind fair appearances. In doing so, they threatened their first
readers' cherished assumptions about women, marriage, and the
fair appearances of the Victorian scene. "Bigamy novels" clearly
22Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar, p. 75
23Lady Audley's Secret, introd. Norman Donaldson (New York: Dover, 1974),
ch. 18, p. 94; subsequent references in my text are to this edition. An excellent
study of Braddon is Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Lzfe and Fiction
of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York and London: Garland, 1979).

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12 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
played upon their readers' own marital frustrations and disillusion-
ments. As James explains, an author like Braddon-aggressive,
clever, familiar with the ways of the world-herself represents an
antithesis to the Victorian ideal of innocent and unchallenging
womanhood: "Miss Braddon deals familiarly with gamblers, and
betting-men, and flashy reprobates of every description. She knows
much that ladies are not accustomed to know, but that they are
apparently very glad to learn."24 Braddon could be taken as going
beyond the genteel realism of a Trollope or a Thackeray to unlock
the true mysteries of life -those that more proper Victorians thought
should be walled off from the reader.
Perhaps the overriding feature of both melodrama and the sen-
sation novel is the subordination of character to plot; in the novel,
not just plot but also descriptive detail and setting can deduct from
character. Collins seems to belie this when, in the preface to the
first edition of The Moonstone, he says:

In some of my former novels, the object proposed has been to trace the
influence of circumstances upon character. In the present story I have
reversed the process. The attempt made, here, is to trace the influence of
character on circumstances. The conduct pursued, under a sudden emer-
gency, by a young girl, supplies the foundation on which I have built
this book.25

The "young girl" is undoubtedly Rachel Verinder, though Collins

might also mean Rosanna Spearman, who hides the chief clue-
Franklin Blake's paint-smeared nightgown-in the quicksand. But
Collins's point is hardly persuasive. Rachel's failure to confront
Franklin with what she has seen prolongs the mystery, but the mys-
tery itself is largely independent of character. If character were
really central, her rejection of Franklin should serve as a tip-off to a
clever detective like Cuff, who instead suspects Rachel. The initial
''circumstance" is the bequest of the diamond to Rachel by her
uncle, from which everything else follows. The lives of all the char-
acters are dramatically-indeed, melodramatically- altered by this
circumstance; the accursed diamond casts a spell on everyone, only
broken by the unraveling of the mystery and the sensational events
at the end.

24James, "Miss Braddon," pp. 115-16.

25Preface to the First Edition, rpt. in The Moonstone, ed. J.I.M. Stewart (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 27.

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The "Sensation Novel" 13
In fiction as in melodrama, the sensational derives much more
from plot than from character. Boucicault's plays were famous for
their "sensation scenes," like the rescue from drowning in The
Colleen Bawn and the explosion on the steamboat in The Octoroon,
and sensation novels contain equivalent episodes, like the arson
scenes in The Woman in White and Lady Audley's Secret. Only a
well-conceived villain or villainess -Collins's Count Fosco, Braddon's
Lady Audley, Le Fanu's Uncle Silas-seems strong enough both to
shape circumstances and to rival sensational events in interest. But
even they are doomed to fall prey to circumstances: an inadvertent
clue, a startling coincidence is all that melodramatic justice seems to
need to unravel their secrets. The world of melodrama and of the
sensation novel is very much one in which circumstances rule char-
acters, propelling them through the intricate machinations of plots
that act like fate. "A hand that is stronger than my own is beckoning
me onward upon the dark road," says Robert Audley, several times
over, in Braddon's tale (ch. 23, p. 131). He is the amateur detective
of the story, but he performs that role reluctantly, contradicting
both his placid character and some of his better inclinations.
Early in her story, Braddon intrudes as narrator to make the
same point that her hero makes about crime and mystery "amid the
fairest scenes." What is remarkable about this narrative interpola-
tion is that it seems itself out of context, coming long before the
reader is certain that any crime has occurred, and even well before
the disappearance of Lady Audley's first husband, George Talboys.
On one side of the intrusion, Talboys and Robert Audley are peace-
fully fishing. On the other side, they return peacefully to their rustic
inn. The narrative interruption seems therefore abrupt, gratuitous,
shocking, like its subject matter:

We hear every day of murders committed in the country. Brutal and

treacherous murders; slow, protracted agonies from poisons administered
by some kindred hand; sudden and violent deaths by cruel blows, inflicted
with a stake cut from some spreading oak, whose every shadow promised-
peace. In the county of which I write, I have been shown a meadow in
which, on a quiet summer Sunday evening, a young farmer murdered the
girl who had loved and trusted him; and yet, even now, with the stain of
that foul deed upon it, the aspect of the spot is -peace. No species of crime
has ever been committed in the worst rookeries about Seven Dials that has
not been also done in the face of that rustic calm which still, in spite of all,
we look on with a tender, half-mournful yearning, and associate with-
peace. (ch. 7, p. 36)

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14 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
This passage is a microcosm of the sensation novel-indeed, of all
mystery novels-not just in its content, but in its structure of abrupt
revelation. And not merely fiction but life is like this, Braddon says:
peace masks violence; innocent appearances cloak evil intentions;
reality itself functions as a mystery until the sudden revelation of
guilt, which is always lurking in the shadows. The passage also serves
as a foreshadowing; even before we are aware of specific crimes,
Braddon makes us listen to the jingling of the keys to the mystery, all
of which are in the narrator's possession. We learn at the outset how
ignorant we are about the story to come -and consequently about
life and the nature of evil - and how much knowledge and power the
narrator has.
Sensation novels involve not radically new techniques but man-
neristic extensions of features from earlier novels. Braddon's key
jingling is a case in point. Without any consciously experimental
intention, she pushes third-person omniscient narration to its logical
limits. The narrator, even while foreshadowing with fatalistic impli-
cations, ceases to convey all information and begins to disguise
much of it as hints, clues, hiatuses, as when Lady Audley orders her
maid to send what would be, if revealed, an incriminating telegram:
"'And now listen, Phoebe. What I want you to do is very simple.' It
was so simple that it was told in five minutes, and then Lady Audley
retired into her bed-room" (ch. 7, p. 39). The central mystery, the
disappearance of George Talboys, involves the same pattern. We
sense that the narrator is being willful and even capricious when
George and Robert view Lady Audley's portrait, but George-and
the narrator-give no sign of recognition. And when George wan-
ders away from Robert and from us, not to reappear until the end of
the novel, the same feeling of narrative willfulness arises.
In The Woman zn White and The Moonstone, Collins escapes
from the logical awkwardness of Braddon's narrative hide-and-seek
by a pattern of multiple first-person narrations roughly similar, as
Kathleen Tillotson suggests, to the overlapping and conflicting
voices of The Ring and the Book (itself almost a versified sensation
novel, though set in the past). But it would be a mistake to over-
emphasize the uniqueness of this pattern or to fail to recognize the
many aspects of Collins's novels that are quite familiar within the
general context of Victorian fiction. T. S. Eliot suggests as much
when he says that the distinction of genre between East Lynne and

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The "Sensation Novel" 15
The Mill on the Floss is much less than the modern distinction
between "highbrow" and detective fiction.26 Nevertheless, to some
extent sensation novels represent extreme elaborations and almost
parodic inversions of works like Middlemarch and Barchester Tow-
ers. The distinction is not a sharp one, but it approximates Trol-
lope's description in his Autobiography:

Among English novels of the present day, and among English novelists, a
great division is made. There are sensational novels and anti-sensational,
sensational novelists and anti-sensational.... The novelists who are con-
sidered to be anti-sensational are generally called realistic. I am realistic.
My friend Wilkie Collins is generally supposed to be sensational.27

Trollope goes on to say that he thinks this division a mistake on the

part of the critics; "a good novel should be both" realistic and sen-
sational, "and both in the highest degree." But realism and sensa-
tionalism are still antithetical in his usage, and he clearly prefers the
probable and commonplace to their opposites. The Eustace Dia-
monds (1873), for example, may itself parody The Moonstone, partly
by removing the mystery and keeping no secrets from the reader.28
At the same time that the narrator of a sensation novel seems to
acquire authority by withholding the solution to a mystery, he or she
also loses authority or at least innocence, becoming a figure no
longer to be trusted. Just as character is subordinated to plot in the
sensation novel, so the narrator is diminished by no longer commu-
nicating with the reliability of the tellers of more forthright tales.
From a presiding mentor, sage, or worldly wise ironist guiding us
through the story as in Middlemarch or Barchester Towers, the
narrative persona must now become either secretive or something
less than omniscient, perhaps slipping back into the interstices of the
story as unobtrusively as possible. If the content of the sensation
novel represented a challenge to bourgeois morality, one way that
challenge shows up structurally is in the undermining of the narra-
tor's credibility. When the story is still told through third-person
omniscient narration, as in Lady A udley's Secret and Armadale, the
problem is most acute: the narrative persona shares the knowledge
26Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 409-10.
27Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, introd. Bradford Allen Booth (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1947), p. 189.
28H.J.W. Milley, "The Eustace Diamonds and The Moonstone, " Studies in Phi-
lology, 36 (1939), 651-63.

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16 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
of the crime with the criminal characters but does not share it
directly with the reader. The narrator therefore takes on a shady,
perhaps even criminal look reminiscent of the old idea that a detec-
tive must be in secret sympathy with criminals in order to catch
them (and metaphorically, at least, detectives are often portrayed as
being in league with the devil).29 This moral ambiguity is a bit like
the relationship between Vautrin and the narrator of Pere Gorzot:
both are men of the world, both have penetrated the "mysteries" of
Paris in ways undreamt of by Eugene Rastignac, and both are inter-
ested in Eugene's journey from innocence to experience. Vautrin, of
course, is a diabolical tempter, but it is also clear that the narrator's
variety of experience is not exactly angelic.
Structurally the detective emerges in the sensation novel as a
substitute for the forthright narrative personae of more realistic
novels, or as a personification of the morally ambivalent role of the
narrator. Like their prototypes, Inspector Bucket and Sergeant
Cuff, most fictional detectives have at the outset a kind of reduced
omniscience, similar to Vautrin's worldly knowledge: they are famil-
iar with society, crime, and criminals, but about the causes of the
particular crime in a story they are at first as much in doubt as the
reader. They do not have a solution but they know how to arrive at
one. They can follow the clues that the no longer trustworthy
narrator-author places in their path, leading towards a restoration
both of social order and of some semblance of narrative omnis-
cience, often through a recapitulation of the hidden events by the
detective, at the end of the story.
Of course the emergence of the detective in fiction can be ex-
plained historically as well as structurally. Walter Benjamin has
analyzed the evolution of detective fiction as a corollary of the
growth of urban anonymity and alienation.30 To such a general
analysis must be added the more specific details of the creation of
the police and detective forces in nineteenth-century cities and of
the fascination of Dickens, Collins, and other writers with them.
Bucket and Cuff represent a penetration of criminal low life and of
"the mysteries of London" that their creators both envied and iden-

29Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from

Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 3-18.
30Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry
Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), pp. 40-48.

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The "Sensation Novel" 17
tified as part of their own novelistic equipment. Mystery and de-
tection in nineteenth-century fiction also appear to be correlatives of
the growth of professional and technical specialization. As the
specialist-like the detective-acquires knowledge in one area,
other areas become opaque, mysterious. The detective as a specialist
who unravels criminal mysteries expresses a wish fulfillment shared
by all of us, to be able to know or to read just a few things very well,
like clues, but through reading them very well to penetrate the deep-
est mysteries of life.
The early, naive development of omniscient narration in fiction
breaks down partly from the intrusion of mystery into it, but partly
also from the recognition of the conventional-and logically pre-
posterous -nature of omniscience. Within Jane Austen's compass of
"two or three families in a country village," omniscient narration
proceeds without apparent difficulty. Within Dickens's London it
begins to seem more artificial, both because the idea of a narrative
persona knowing everything about such a vast place implies
something close to supernatural authority (clearly an uneasy fit in
fiction purporting to be realistic) and because from the outset Dick-
ens wants to show us the "mysteries" of the city while still rendering
them mysterious. Dickens's occasional experiments with narrative
structure - the double narration of Bleak House, for example - can
be seen as attempts to deal with these contradictions. So, too, can
the even more radical experiments in Wilkie Collins's novels: the
multiple narrations of The Woman in White and The Moonstone,
the odd mixture of narrative patterns and effects in No Name and
Armadale. In the latter, Collins achieves something close to multiple
narration by interjecting correspondence without authorial com-
ment (the letters between Lydia Gwilt and Maria Oldershaw), long
passages of dialogue in which characters recount their life stories
(the opening confession of Allan Armadale), condensations of long
periods of time as viewed through the memories of a single character
(the Rev. Mr. Brock's recollections in the first chapter of the second
book), and Lydia's diary at the end of the tale. At the same time,
the supposedly omniscient narrator of Armadale does not often
intrude into the story either to moralize or to speculate about events.
The strange world of the Armadale "doubles" and of the dream
which comes true seems thus to exist in a kind of vacuum. Because
of the dream and the heavy doses of coincidence, everything in

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18 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Armadale seems to be laden with a preternatural-if not quite
supernatural-significance. Because of the unobtrusiveness of the
narrator, however, this potential significance is never explained,
even while the reader-in common with the characters-witnesses
the unraveling of the secular mysteries that constitute the plot. The
story's emphasis on "fate" or "destiny" does not finally point beyond
the labyrinthine windings of its plot to something more than acci-
dent or chance. When Collins does at last intrude as narrator,
presumably to explain the higher mysteries to which the secular
mysteries seem to point, it is only in an appendix in which he gives
no answers: "My readers will perceive that I have purposely left
them, with reference to the Dream in this story, in the position
which they would occupy in the case of a dream in real life -they
are free to interpret it by the natural or the supernatural theory, as
the bent of their own minds may incline them."'3' Of course Collins
is only dodging the questions about dreams and predestination that
his novel has so elaborately raised. The passage thus represents an
abdication of omniscience and a backhanded acknowledgment of
the diminished stature of the narrative persona in contrast to, say,
those in George Eliot's novels.
As in Armadale, the introduction of mystery- the self-conscious
withholding of any important information from the reader-neces-
sarily both diminishes and complicates the role of narrator. The
narrator must seem either to connive with criminals, thereby sacri-
ficing moral legitimacy, or to suffer a kind of structural amnesia,
only recovering something close to omniscience as a version of
memory or recapitulation at the end of the story. The detective -in
the sensation novel, often the protagonist like Walter Hartright of
The Woman in White rather than a professional - appears to fill the
vacuum created by the at least partial abdication of authority by the
narrator. Even when the conventions of third-person omniscient
narration are maintained, as in Armadale and Lady Audley's Se-
cret, once detection begins the information supplied to the reader
tends to be reduced to the information possessed or discovered by
the detective. The mystery acts like a story which the narrator re-
fuses or has forgotten how to tell; the detective must now "put the

3'Appendix, Armadale (New York: Dover, 1977), p. 597.

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The "Sensation Novel" 19
pieces together." The plot unwinds through the gradual discovery-
or, better, recovery-of knowledge, until at the end what detective
and reader know coincides with what the secretive or somehow
remiss narrator-author has presumably known all along. But this
coincidence of knowledge is no longer "omniscience" of the kind
present, say, in Middlemarch. The diminution-indeed, perhaps
even criminalization-of the narrator is also linked to a diminution
of the kind of knowledge hidden and recovered: he or she can now
hold the keys only to a secular mystery, ordinarily of the criminal,
most sordid kind, and can no longer make any very credible or con-
sistent claim to be able to unlock the higher mysteries of life, nature,
society, God. The equivocations and silences of Collins's narrative
personae suggest these transformations of metaphysical-religious
knowledge into the solution of a crime puzzle and of the omniscient
narrator into a collaborator with his disreputable character doubles,
the criminal and the detective.
The detective, moreover, is not so much the antithesis of the
narrator, trying to recover what the narrator secretes, as one of his
personifications in the text, presiding over the plot and leading the
reader down several false paths before discovering-or recovering-
the true one. That is, just as the narrator in the sensation novel must
simultaneously reveal and withhold information, so the detective:
his knowledge is usually greater than the reader's, but it is incom-
plete; he may finally know even less than the reader. Sergeant Cuff,
for example, solves only parts of the mystery in The Moonstone, sets
up some false leads, and then leaves the scene until near the end; he
is not exactly more successful at providing information than the
missing third-person narrator. In W. S. Gilbert's comic opera spoof,
A Sensation Novel in Three Volumes, the Scotland Yard investi-
gator, Gripper, seems mainly bent on delaying the solution of mys-
teries and allowing criminals to escape. Disguised as a North Ameri-
can Indian, Gripper says:
When information I receive that Jones has been a-forging,
And on the proceeds of his crime is prodigally gorging,
Do you suppose I collar my friend and take him to the beak, m'm?
Why, bless your heart, they wouldn't retain me in the force a week, m'm.
In curious wig and quaint disguise, and strangely altered face, m'm,
Unrecognised I follow my prey about from place to place, m'm;

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20 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
I note his hair, his eyes, his nose, his clothing and complexion,
And when I have got 'em all into my head, I set about detection.32

And thus Jones slips through Gripper's fingers. Gilbert is right: fic-
tional detectives seem often to be in collusion with both criminals
and narrators, functioning as much to blow smoke in the reader's
eyes as to provide solutions. They mimic the ambivalence of their at
least partially abdicated narrators. Their roles are largely dictated
by the central structural ambiguity upon which all mystery and de-
tective fiction is based, an ambiguity suggested by the idea of "tell-
ing a secret" -you must first be a party to holding the secret in order
to tell it.

III

Despite the air of preternatural significance in a novel like

Armadale, mysteries in most sensation novels do not clearly connect
with anything higher than a particular case of arson or bigamy or
murder. The mysteries in Bleak House point to the larger mysteries
of community and isolation, love and selfishness in the society that
Dickens anatomizes. But the mystery of The Moonstone, even
though serious attitudes about crime and poverty, religious hypoc-
risy, the law, and the empire can be inferred from it, does not
explicitly point beyond itself to larger issues.33 And unlike the
Dedlocks and their followers in Bleak House, who represent every-
thing that Dickens thinks is wrong with the decaying aristocracy of
the 1850s, Sir Percival Glyde and Count Fosco in The Woman in
White are not bearers of social or even very weighty moral messages.
Sir Percival is a stereotypic melodrama villain from whose career of
deceit and crime Collins asks us to draw only the most obvious of
morals. Count Fosco is much more interesting as a character, but
the shadowy Italian politics that destroy him at the end of the novel
are only a deus ex machina to bring on his just deserts. Collins is not
interested in saying anything about secret societies, or Mazzini, or
the Orsini affair. He does not even take the occasion to deplore the
terrible conditions in private insane asylums, as Charles Reade does

32A Sensation Novel in Three Volumes (London: Joseph Williams, 1912), pp.
22-23.
33For a contrasting argument see John R. Reed, "English Imperialism and the
Unacknowledged Crime of The Moonstone," Clio, 2 (1973), 281-90.

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The "Sensation Novel" 21
in Hard Cash. Several of Collins's other novels-No Name and Man
and Wife with their treatment of the injustice of the marriage laws,
for example -take up social reform themes in the Dickens manner.
And no matter how melodramatic, Charles Reade's novels put social
reform in the forefront.
The mysteries in Lady Audley's Secret, Uncle Silas, The
Woman in White, and The Moonstone, however, function like those
in later mystery novels and do not connect with anything outside
themselves. In each case, though much that is violent and terrifying
happens along the way, the mystery turns out to be soluble, unlike
the larger mysteries raised by Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.
The worst evils that can be perpetrated by individuals are un-
masked, but the instant of their revelation is usually also the instant
of their exorcism. The paradox is that sensation novels- and mys-
tery novels after them - conclude in ways that liquidate mystery:
they are not finally mysterious at all. The insoluble is reduced to the
soluble, just as the social evils that most concern Dickens are re-
duced to the level of personal villainy. Guilt is displaced onto others,
which is to say onto scapegoat characters whom we are quite glad to
see punished, and the good characters with whom we most strongly
identify "come out clean" and are rewarded with happy endings.
W. H. Auden describes the process in his essay on mysteries, "The
Guilty Vicarage":

The magic formula is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt;

then a suspicion of being the guilty one; and finally a real innocence from
which the guilty other has been expelled, a cure effected, not by me or my
neighbors, but by the miraculous intervention of a genius from outside
who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt. (The detective story sub-
scribes, in fact, to the Socratic daydream: "Sin is ignorance. ")34

Auden suggests the ritual nature of detective fiction, with the detec-
tive as the priest who performs the exorcism. But the pattern is not
fully developed in sensation novels, which are more flexible and
various than modern detective novels and, as T. S. Eliot points out,
closer to serious fiction.35 Their structures are consequently less
reassuring; the detectives in them, for example, are usually not
Auden's "genius from outside" but a character or characters directly

34The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 158.
35Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 417-18.

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22 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
involved in the story. Indeed, Sergeant Cuff, the prototype of later
professional sleuths, is not the chief detective in The Moonstone.
That role belongs to Franklin Blake, the protagonist, who turns out
also to have stolen the diamond. And the piecemeal process of de-
tection depends heavily on luck and coincidence, as in Oliver Twist
(the most striking coincidence in The Moonstone, of course, is also
the most baffling: that Franklin Blake himself is the thief).
The paradox of Franklin Blake, or of the detective in pursuit of
himself, points to the essence of later mystery novels. Most serious
novels-manifestly in a Bildungsroman, for example-involve a
search for the self, the attempt of at least one character to stake out
a career or an identity in the social wilderness. In sensation and
mystery novels, however, just as the intractable problem of evil is
reduced to a neatly soluble puzzle on a personal level, so the search
for self is short-circuited. The unraveling of the mystery, as in The
Moonstone where Franklin Blake works his way through the laby-
rinth of clues and false leads only to discover that he himself has
stolen the diamond, mimics self-revelation but points the other way.
The mystery revealed exonerates both the protagonist and the reader
from guilt: Franklin's act was unconscious; the real villain is his
rival, Godfrey Ablewhite, whom we are only too glad to have mur-
dered by the convenient Indians, the rightful owners of the gem.
Few works of fiction have been more psychoanalyzed-as op-
posed to criticized and admired for their serious qualities -than The
Moonstone. This is due partly to its approximation to fullness and
seriousness. It is a big novel, with many characters, with an unusual
narrative structure, and with an intricate plot-nearly as full and
complicated, say, as Bleak House. But it is a big novel with a hole in
the middle, tunnel vision, represented symbolically by the obsessive
object named in its title: only find the Moonstone and all questions
are answered. Bleak House is among other things a murder mystery,
but the noose of guilt is ultimately drawn around everyone, around
society at large, as symbolized by the upward spreading smallpox
and by the all-engulfing Chancery suit. For its victims, there is
usually no way out of Chancery, just as there is no escape from guilt
and the law in The Trial. But in The Moonstone, the short circuit
from Franklin Blake the detective to Franklin Blake the unconscious
thief (albeit after many pages of twists and implications) and thence
to Franklin Blake the rewarded and happy protagonist is eminently

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The "Sensation Novel" 23
satisfying and finally too neat. Collins makes brilliant use of the con-
ventions of the best Victorian novels while undercutting their most
serious implications. In much the same way, other sensation novels
and mysteries mimic serious fiction.
In the best of the psychoanalytic essays on The Moonstone,
Albert D. Hutter grants too much to detective fiction when he likens
it to the process of psychoanalysis itself:

Detective fiction involves the transformation of a fragmented and incom-

plete set of events into a more ordered and complete understanding. As
such it seems to bridge a private psychological experience, like dreaming,
and literary experience in general. And like a psychoanalysis, the detective
story reorders our perception of the past through language.36

The idea that detective fiction acts as a bridge between dreams "and
literary experience in general" may be correct, but Hutter's next
sentence seems to contradict what I have just said about the reduc-
tion of mystery to a soluble level and the short-circuiting of the
search for the self. Leo L6wenthal's dictum that "mass culture is
psychoanalysis in reverse" is closer to the mark than the idea that
detective fiction acts like a psychoanalysis.37 Detective fiction only
mimics the processes that are like psychoanalysis in serious fiction; it
is both diverting and diversionary, and inevitably reductive. Hutter
appears to recognize this when he says that Collins "adopts . . . the
device so common to the Victorian novel of splitting hero and villain
and giving one the crime and punishment so that the other may be
free to enjoy his rewards without guilt."38 While this may call into
question the analytic power of all fiction where such character split-
ting occurs, it also suggests why it means very little to say that de-
tective fiction follows the pattern of a psychoanalysis. It only mimics
that pattern, just as it mimics aspects of serious fiction.
A distinction must be made between trait or character splitting
in sensation novelists like Collins and in more realistic novelists like
George Eliot. In the former, character splitting is more pronounced,
again partly reflecting the influence of the Gothic romance. The
two Allan Armadales, Anne Catherick as ghostly double-goer in The

36"Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of Detective

Fiction," Victorian Studies, 19 (1975), 191.
37Lowenthal, quoted by Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1973), p. 173.
38Hutter, "Dreams, Transformations, and Literature," pp. 202-3.

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24 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Woman in White, and the two lives, two husbands, and two per-
sonalities of Lady Audley hark back to the patterns of doubling in a
Gothic tale like James Hogg's Confessions of a Justzfied Sinner.
These patterns can be partly explained psychoanalytically as expres-
sive of narcissistic regression. Such tendencies exist mainly on a
metaphoric level in most realistic novels, whereas they are given
much more literal expression in romantic fiction, including the sen-
sation novel. As Winifred Hughes says, sensation novels "reveal a
recurrent preoccupation with the loss or duplication of identity.
. . .Everywhere in the lesser sensation novels the unwitting pro-
tagonists experience their strange encounters with the empty form of
the doppelgdnger."39
Hughes goes on to point out that "incident as well as character is
subject to the principle of duality." The plots of sensation novels
"are typically structured around a recurrence of similar or identical
situations, not infrequently in the shape of dreams or omens and
their ultimate fulfillment."40 A structural explanation for this dou-
bling of incidents emerges from the realization that mystery stories
are necessarily two-fold. Hutter points to Tzvetan Todorov's essay
on detective novels in The Poetics of Prose, in which Todorov shows
that they are always double narratives. The first narrative concerns
the past and the crime that has been committed; it is wound up and
unraveled in the second narrative, which concerns the present and
recounts the detection of the cause of the crime. Todorov relates this
pattern of double narration to the Formalist distinction between
"fable," which corresponds to "what happened in life," and "sub-
ject" or plot, which corresponds to "the way the author presents it to
us." 41 But in the detective novel "what happens in life" is virtually
reduced to a variant of "the way the author presents it to us."
Whereas serious literature imitates life partly by reducing and sim-
plifying its scale and complexity, the mystery novel imitates serious
literature by carrying its reductive and simplifying tendencies to
extremes. Like the sensation novel from which it evolved, the mys-
tery novel shrinks "fable" to a single event or a few related ones (a
crime or crimes, murder or theft often combined in sensation novels

39Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar, p. 21.

40Ibid.
4'The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1977), p. 45.

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The "Sensation Novel" 25
with bigamy and the assumption of false identities), just as it also
shrinks mystery to a soluble level and diverts the problem of self-
identity into a pattern of exorcism or of the projection of guilt onto
another. "Plot" then follows the path of detection through conveni-
ently placed clues to the final explanation of this simplified version
of "fable," correctly identifying the culprit - the personified cause of
the "fable" - and dishing out punishment and rewards. Like the
fatal "hand" that keeps pointing Robert Audley down the path of
detection, or like the pattern of improbable coincidences in most
melodramas and sensation novels, the unraveling of the plot seems
dimly to represent the working out of destiny: everything is put back
in order at the end, all questions have been answered.
Hutter proceeds to analyze the unconscious sexual symbolism in
The Moonstone and to consider both the oedipal theory of mystery
stories and the more interesting- because less obvious and perhaps
less reductive- theory that mysteries are symbolic re-creations of the
primal scene. No doubt both theories can help to explain all fic-
tions, but the primal scene idea seems especially relevant to mys-
teries, and perhaps even more to sensation novels, in which the
mysteries occur within families, than to many later detective novels.
The theory, as Hutter explains it, "reads detective fiction as an
expression of primal scene fears and wishes, that is, as an expression
of the conflicts of the child who witnesses parental intercourse."
Hutter's application of this theory to The Moonstone is especially
insightful, partly because it is a novel "built around a visual tension
. . . the characters watching a crime committed in a bedroom at
night, not understanding it, and suffering because they are forced
into a new view of a loved object."42 Obsessive curiosity and voyeur-
ism characterize all mystery stories, but the theory fits best where the
mystery is confined to a family and the voyeurism is a matter of life
and death to the voyeur, as in both Lady Audley's Secret and Uncle
Silas, for example, and also in much Gothic fiction. Such a thesis
involves interpreting both the victims or corpses and the villains as
surrogate parent figures, seen dimly through the childhood memory

42Hutter, "Dreams, Transformations, and Literature," pp. 203-4. The first

crude version of this theory is Geraldine Pederson-Krag, "Detective Stories and the
Primal Scene," Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 18 (1949), 207-14. See also Charles
Rycroft, "The Analysis of a Detective Story," Imagination and Reality, introd. M.
Masud R. Khan and John D. Sutherland (New York: International Universities
Press, 1968), pp. 114-28.

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26 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
of the fearful vision (whether real or imagined) which both miscon-
strues the parental intercourse as an act of violence and secretly
wishes it to be such an act. In Uncle Silas, which has, if anything,
even more "visual tension" and horror related to that tension than
The Moonstone, the Bluebeard and vampire-werewolf metaphors
attached to Maud Ruthvyn's terrifying uncle point towards the re-
gressive pattern suggested by the primal scene theory, although it is
Silas's son, Dudley, who aims at marrying Maud, seducing her, or
having her any way he can. The terrific finale points even more
clearly in the same direction: Maud watches from the shadows as
Dudley drives home the strange pick axe, with its "longish tapering
spike," meant for Maud herself, time after time into the breast of
the apparently sleeping Mme. de la Rougierre, whose body heaves
with "a horrible tremor" and "convulsions," "the arms drumming
on the bed," until "the diabolical surgery was ended" (ch. 64, pp.
426-27). It is a "sensation scene" to match anything in Boucicault's
plays - anything in the entire literature of sensation, in fact - for its
combination of grisly terror with erotic suggestion. The regressive
quality of Uncle Silas and Le Fanu's other fiction is unmistakable,
whether it is better explained by the primal scene idea or some other
psychological theory; that quality is the chief source of its very con-
siderable power.
Most sensation novels confine their voyeuristic, primal scene
revelations to family circles, but the family itself was the mainstay of
Victorian bourgeois values. Sensation novels were therefore subver-
sive without ordinarily addressing political issues. They stripped the
veils from Victorian respectability and prudery, exposing bigamists
and adulterers, vampires and murderesses. They did so not by push-
ing the conventions of realistic fiction to the limits, as Zola was soon
to do in France, but by subverting those conventions themselves,
importing romantic elements back into contemporary settings, rein-
vesting the ordinary with mystery (albeit only of the secular, crimi-
nal variety), and undoing narrative omniscience to let in kinds of
knowledge that realistic fiction had often excluded. In place of the
empiricist realism that strives for objective, direct mimesis, the
sensation novel seems to substitute a different measure of reality,
based on primal scene psychology, that now reads objective ap-
pearances as question marks or clues to mysteries and insists that the
truth has been hidden, buried, smuggled away behind the appear-

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The "Sensation Novel" 27
ances. But this subversive attitude is also felt to be regressive,
inferior to traditional realism: the sensation novel never directly
challenged the dominance of more serious, more realistic fiction,
and sensational authors and narrators seem forever to be backing
away from the deepest truths in their stories, abdicating or under-
mining their own authority. Precisely because of their reductive and
regressive properties, however, sensation novels often approach the
quality and complexity of more serious Victorian fiction. Perhaps it
would be best to say that sensation novels seize upon and exaggerate
the reductive properties that are already present in serious fiction.
In terms like Derrida's on the impurity of genres, T. S. Eliot writes:

You cannot define Drama and Melodrama so that they shall,be recipro-
cally exclusive; great drama has something melodramatic in it, and the
best melodrama partakes of the greatness of drama. The Moonstone is very
near to Bleak House. The theft of a diamond has some of the same
blighting effect on the lives about it as the suit in Chancery.43

The development of the sensation novel marks a crisis in the history

of literary realism. At the same time that George Eliot was investing
the novel with a new philosophical gravity, the sensationalists were
breaking down the conventions of realistic fiction and pointing the
way to the emergence of later popular forms and perhaps also to
later, more conscious assertions of the need to go beyond realism
into all those mysterious areas of life and art that supposedly omnis-
cient narrators often seem not to know. Although anything "sensa-
tional" is by definition not to be taken too seriously, the word itself
points to a source of immediate excitement or surprise, the realm of
the unexpected. As T. S. Eliot remarks, "we cannot afford to forget
that the first - and not one of the least difficult - requirements of
either prose or verse is that it should be interesting."44 Whatever
else they are, sensation novels are certainly that. In his defense of
literary sensationalism in Belgravia (a journal edited by none other
than Mary Elizabeth Braddon) George Augustus Sala launched an
assault on "the dolts and dullards and envious backbiters" for whom
"everything is 'sensational' that is vivid, and nervous, and forcible,
and graphic, and true." If these "anti-sensationalists" had their way,
Sala declared in his final terrific sentence, then life itself would be a

43Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 417-18.

44Ibid., p. 418.

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28 Nineteenth-Century Fiction
sorry affair, for they would establish a new reign of dullness: "Don't
let us move, don't let us travel, don't let us hear or see anything; but
let us write sonnets to Chloe, and play madrigals on the spinet, and
dance minuets, and pray to Heaven against Sensationalism, the
Pope, the Devil, and the Pretender; and then let Dulness reign
triumphant, and Universal Darkness cover all."45 Sala's sensational
protest points forward to the fuller, more profound rebellions of the
decadent and modernist writers who wrote the final epitaphs for the
safer kinds of realism and for the Victorian pieties of hearth and
home.

Indiana University

45"On the 'Sensational' in Literature and Art," Belgravia, 4 (1868), 457, 458.

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