Sensation Fiction

Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Sensation fiction
characteristics:
- melodramatic and intricate plots
- dark secret
- influence of the Gothic novel
- shocking depiction of murder, adultery, and seduction
- popular with both Victorian and modern readers
- blossoming in the 1860s
- sensation novelists - Wilkie Collins, Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon
- set in the contemporary moment, often featured seemingly ordinary middle-class
characters
- some Victorian critics hostile – see sensation novel as a cultural degeneration, a moral
decay
- sensation fiction writers – ‘no genius and little talent’
- M. E. Braddon ‘has made the literature of the Kitchen into the favourite reading of the
Drawing Room'.
- sensation novels - exert a physical reaction
- activated a set of anxieties about class and the status of literary culture itself
- Christian morality transgressed, but not fundamentally questioned as the basis of Victorian
society
- the pattern of transgression followed by punishment, redemption, or assimilation, but
these novels are not formulaic
- a critique of the primary novelistic genre of realism
Wilkie Collins (1824 –1889)
- English novelist and playwright
- The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868) (the first English modern
detective novel)
- the originator of sensation fiction
- a close friend of Dickens
- his fiction - immediacy and modernity
- often inspired by real-life crimes
- modern inventions like telegrams, railway timetables play vital roles in the plots
- amateur detectives

Wilkie Collins - Questions of Identity, and the Pleasure of the Search

The Woman in White (1859)
- a huge success for Collins
- it set a pattern followed by many sensationalists
- story - told through the written statements, letters, and journals of various characters
- Walter Hartright ‘s proclamation of veracity - the story will be narrated as if in a court of
law
-at times he doubts his own state of mind (we might also doubt his ordering of the
narrative):
Had the events of the morning so unnerved me already that I was at the mercy of any delusion which
common chances and common coincidences might suggest to my imagination? (p.76)

- Walter and other amateur sensation fiction detectives- fatalism and rationalism work hand
in hand in these novels
- rational and supernatural /fatalistic approaches to their task leads sensation protagonists
to doubt their own sanity and the coherence of their own identity
- Walter: ‘I began to doubt whether my own faculties were not in danger of losing their balance. It
seemed almost like a monomania to be tracking back everything that happened, everything
unexpected that was said, always to the same hidden source and the same sinister influence. (p. 80)

- M.E. Braddon's amateur detective Robert Audley, 'Am I never to get any nearer the truth; but
am I to be tormented all my life by vague doubts and wretched suspicions, which may grow upon me
till I become a monomaniac?’ (p. 146)
- Walter and Marion - spend almost as much time enquiring into their own states of mind, as
they do searching for evidence
- Collins explores slippages and similarities between his heroes and his villains, the unstable
boundary between the normal and the deviant is one of the hallmarks of his fiction
- entering into the criminal mind - the boundaries between crime and detection seem to
become porous
- The Moonstone (1868) - theories of 19th c psychology, also French neurologist J.M. Charcot
who used hypnosis

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835 – 1915)

- started career as an actress
- prolific author, best known for her novel Lady Audley's Secret (1862)
- wrote to support herself and her family
- her female anti-heroines pushed the boundaries of conventional femininity
- her novels added to the debates that questioned traditional secondary and subjected
female roles
- her active female protagonists defy and deconstruct de-limiting expectations of feminine
propriety

Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret

- the eponymous protagonist seems to fulfil all the stereotypes of angelic femininity
(Coventry Patmore's poem The Angel in the House)
- Robert Audley, the amateur detective - uncovers her identity to be a fraud
- Lady Audley - easily and completely feigns the ideal Victorian feminine identity – the
question: Is that model of femininity constructed rather than natural?
- Robert Audley: 'I believe that we may look into the smiling face of a murderer and admire its
tranquil beauty.' (p. 141)

- Robert Audley/readers attracted and repulsed by the combination of beauty and evil Lady
Audley embodies
- The Pre-Raphaelite style portrait of Lady Audley - the beautiful lady hides a fiend or
monster within
No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have painted, hair by hair, those feathery masses of ringlets with
every glimmer of gold, and every shadow of pale brown. No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have
exaggerated every attribute of that delicate face as to give a lurid lightness to the blonde complexion,
and a strange, sinister light to the deep blue eyes. No one but a pre-Raphaelite could have given to
that pretty pouting mouth the hard and almost wicked look it had in the portrait… my lady… had
something of the aspect of a beautiful fiend (p.71).

- Braddon's description of the portrait reveals a truer insight than ordinary vision
- O. Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) also uses a portrait as a sort of magic mirror to
the inner-self
- Lady Audley's duplicitous beauty - reproduced again and again in the sensation genre
- women in contemporary novels possessing 'not only the velvet, but the claws of the tiger.
She is no longer the Angel, but the Devil in the House’
- the protagonist - destabilised the patriarchal family, demonstrated dangerous power of
female intelligence
- Lady Audley - both a murderous fiend and an everywoman

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)

- Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847) – understood in the context of 19th c political, social, and
economic changes
- 18th c vs 19thc novels - a much denser, more specific, and detailed picture of the societies
in which they are set
- Thackeray - both an insider and an outsider, gave him both knowledge of and distance from
the society he portrayed
- from a wealthy Anglo-Indian family
- a typical son of a prosperous British upper-middle class family

William M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair

- probably started working seriously on Vanity Fair in late 1844, early 1845
- his path to sales success in fiction was not easy
- had a tough and wide-ranging apprenticeship, his output prodigious and strikingly various
- from 1835 to 1845 he 'wrote for his life'
- when VF finally appeared in January 1847 – immediate success
- Thackeray and Dickens - the best paid novelists of the age
- in 1844 a series entitled 'Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society’, returned to this
unfinished work which became Vanity Fair
- during the next decade - produced his greatest novels, Pendennis, Henry Esmond, and The
Newcomers
- VF first appeared in serial form
- serial publication created a particularly close relationship between audience and author
- Thackeray drew numerous illustrations for his text - provide another layer of commentary
on the action of the novel
- e.g., the illustration that involves Jos' s death (Chapter 67)
Vanity Fair (Chapter 67)  Becky's second appearance as the seductive Clytemnestra
The title and the idea:
- the title from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim's Progress (1678), a village called 'Vanity’ - a perpetual
fair, symbol of the human attachment to earthly and ungodly things
- Thackeray’s portrait of human nature is shown to be preoccupied with status, wealth, and
ownership (speaks to modern readers)
- the disjointed and diverse tale - held together by one central theme - foibles and
deceptions of the inhabitants of VF
- he points out the duplicity, the dishonesty, the double crossing of human beings
- money and position are desirable but transient
Narrative technique/the plot and structure of VF
- criticised for its formlessness
- lacks the elegant design of novels focused on the progress of a single main character
- VF organised around the lives of two characters, Becky, and Amelia
- more careful look at the novel - easily summarized and stripped down into shapes and
patterns
- before Waterloo, the business of the novel is marriage, family disfavour and disinheritance
- after Waterloo, the heroines' lives separate, the great issue is marital fidelity
- two triangular relationships develop
-Thackeray creates a narrative of panoramic historical sweep and of subtle ironic effects
- in VF Thackeray worked to raise the tone of mid-19th c fiction and with it the status of the
novelist or in other words -he found the English novel sloppy romance, and left it solid
realism
- his ‘correction’ entails criticism as well as good example
- Thackeray ‘s VF - genres such as the 'Newgate, 'silver fork' and 'Napoleonic soldier of
fortune novel
- the beginning of Ch VI 'Vauxhall’: 'We might have treated this subject in the genteel, or in
the romantic, or in the facetious manner.'
- our early glimpses of Sir Pitt Crawley - we recognise certain literary conventions and
stereotypes which the author parodies
- Becky’s writing letters – parody of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (18th c)
- early scenes provide comic entertainment, later his reference to other works of literature
becomes serious criticism
- e.g., the scene in which Dobbin tells Amelia that she is unworthy of him
- throughout VF, and explicitly in Ch VI, Thackeray makes clear he is not like other novelists
- yet he also conforms to the fiction it purports to chastise (e.g., its 'arsenical' ending)
I know what your heart is capable of: it can cling faithfully to a recollection and cherish a fancy, but it
can't feel such an attachment as mine deserves to mate with, and such as I would have won from a
woman more generous than you. No, you are not worthy of the love which I have devoted to you. I
knew all along that the prize I had set my life on was not worth the winning; that I was a fool, with
fond fancies, too, bartering away my all of truth and ardour against your little feeble remnant of love.
I will bargain no more: I withdraw. I find no fault with you. You are very good-natured, and have done
your best, but you couldn't--you couldn't reach up to the height of the attachment which I bore you,
and which a loftier soul than yours might have been proud to share. (Ch 66)

- Thackeray’s complex and intimate relationship with the modes of fashionable fiction of the
age than his apparently dismissive satirical manner suggests
- historical novel - his feelings about the Regency period mixed feelings of nostalgia and
severe moral criticism
- despite Thackeray’s fascination with Waterloo, he denies his readers t e description of the
battle:
We do not claim to rank among the military novelists. Our place is with the non-combatants. When
the decks are cleared for action, we go below and wait meekly. We should only be in the way of the
manoeuvres that the gallant fellows are performing overhead. (…) (Ch. 30)